Boom! Bust!http://www.hcn.org/articles/boom-bust
Forty-five years of High Country News boom and bust cover stories."Street gambling, prostitution and cocaine are available to anyone," bemoans a social worker. The year: 1974. The place: Rock Springs, Wyoming.

Some 3,000 workers had just descended on Rock Springs to construct a huge coal-fired power plant. High Country News's Joan Nice was on the scene, snapping photos of the makeshift worker camps and cataloguing the boom-town carnage: "overloaded sewage system … traffic congestion … new kinds of crime."

High Country News was then less than five years old, and all around its home base in Lander, Wyoming, could be heard the clanging of new industry. It was the 1970s energy crisis: demand for electricity was climbing, U.S. oil and gas production had tapered off, and the Middle East's major oil producers had cut exports. The crisis whiplashed into a frenzied rush for the West's coal, oil, gas and uranium.

Thus began an HCN tradition of covering the West's booms and busts. Since Joan Nice's 1974 cover story, more than a dozen other boom/bust stories have graced the cover of HCN. Jonathan Thompson's cover story in the current March 16 issue, "Lessons from boom and bust in New Mexico," focuses on the most recent binge of oil and gas drilling, asking: What have we learned?

In that spirit, here's a look back at HCN's front-page boom and bust stories over the past 45 years.

Jan. 28, 1977: "Wheatland: the model boom town?"

As the energy boom rippled across the West, some communities were determined to not end up like Rock Springs. That included Wheatland, Wyoming, where a group of utilities, starting in 1974, moved ahead with plans to bring 2,000 workers to town to construct another large coal-fired power plant.

The Wheatland power plant was the first project to fall under Wyoming's 1975 Industrial Siting Act, which was enacted in response to the energy boom. The law requires large industrial projects to assist communities struggling with negative impacts of those projects. In Wheatland, the utilities shelled out $30 million for housing assistance and other services.

Elsewhere, hopes of dodging the boom-town curse fell short. Construction of two giant new natural gas processing plants brought thousands of workers to Evanston, Wyoming, but the industry secured exemptions from Wyoming's Siting Act. The companies volunteered to help soften the impacts, but it wasn't enough. HCN's June 26, 1981 cover story, "The Overthrust moneybelt," begins: "Untreated sewage is overflowing into the Bear River."

In 1982, HCN revisited Wheatland as construction of the power plant was winding down ("The price of prosperity," HCN5/28/1982). Many residents said the Siting Act had allowed Wheatland to cope rather well with the boom. Still, "only a few shops (were) left open" as the workers left town. In the end, even the best strategy for surviving the boom couldn't stave off the bust.

By the late 1970s the energy frenzy was sputtering, hit by a weakening economy and improved conservation that reduced energy demand. The 1979 Three Mile Island accident — which made the country skittish about nuclear power — and a sharp downturn in uranium prices heaped extra bust on uranium country, which had prospered since World War II.

Jeffrey City, Wyoming was a small town built mostly from scratch to serve the nearby uranium mines. The mining companies had paid for new streets, schools and — at the request of the miners' wives — a swimming pool and tennis court ("Women face boom town isolation," HCN 9/10/1976). But when the uranium bust hit, hundreds of workers were laid off, triggering an exodus.

The bust also rippled through the oil and gas fields, especially in northern Colorado's oil shale country. The federal government had spurred oil companies to extract oil embedded in rock that could be mined from the surface — a laborious process that penciled out only with oil prices high. On May 2, 1982 — "Black Sunday" — falling oil prices triggered the collapse of the oil shale ventures, and overnight more than 2,000 people lost their jobs. HCN's Ed Marston, who had taken the helm of HCN in 1983, surveyed the aftermath of the bust ("Life after oil shale," HCN 4/15/1983).

By 1985, the Uranium Café on the main drag in Grants, New Mexico — where 37 uranium mines and five mills were operating in 1980 — was boarded up ("A New Mexico uranium town wonders how far it will fall," HCN 4/1/1985). The town had once proclaimed itself the "Carrot Capital of the World," and as it became obvious that mining wasn't coming back, some boosters looked to a future of tourism and retirees. One former miner, however, told HCN: "Who wants to come to Grants? Nobody."

July 7, 1997: "While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills ... and languishes"

Other busts struck more locally, where communities depended on a single smelter ("Anaconda: The smelter shuts down, and so does the town," HCN 11/14/1980) or mine ("A busted Wyoming mining town remains haunted by 550 lost jobs," HCN 3/18/1985). Meanwhile, Rock Springs — despite the horrors of past booms — welcomed an expansion of a gas processing plant ("The boom is back in Southwestern Wyoming," HCN 2/18/1985).

In a 1997 cover story, Paul Krza reflected on the spasmodic economic history of Rock Springs and other Wyoming towns, and wonders if the state will ever break out of the cycle. The "New West," he observes, is cashing in without drilling or digging things from the earth.

And in the end, Krza concluded, it might just be in Wyoming's cultural and political DNA to "sit back, depend on minerals and wait for another boom."

Sept. 13, 2004: "When a Boom is a Bust"

That brings us to the current big boom-bust. Rising natural gas prices in the late '90s and early 2000s spurred a new rush of drilling to tap coalbed methane, a form of natural gas that's easily extracted from some coal formations ("Wyoming's powder keg," HCN 11/5/2001). And by the mid-2000s, hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") and other new drilling techniques were detonating a drilling frenzy across the West.

In 2004, HCN's Ray Ring found the tiny Wyoming town of Wamsutter —"probably the ugliest town in the West," he wrote — struggling to transmute its gas-patch cash into real community. (He also climbed Wamsutter's water tower to get a bird's eye view of the town and the "bleak handsomeness" of the landscape.) In 2005, Ring found another gas-patch boom town, Pinedale, Wyoming, faring better as it taps state and local taxes to build a new hockey rink, a riding arena at the fairgrounds, a new senior center, new county shops, hiking paths, and a $600,000 practice field for high school athletics ("Gold from the Gas Fields," HCN 11/28/2005). But even in Pinedale, Ring discovered, many residents feel that the boom's downsides — doubled housing costs, air pollution from the rigs, increased crime — outweigh the gains.

"Boom! Boom!" blared HCN's cover story on May 12, 2008, as natural gas drilling is peaking. HCN author Francisco Tharp found Rifle, Colorado once again torn between fast cash and stable community. Rifle busted hard during the 1982 oil shale crash, but had rebuilt itself as a tourist and retirement community serving the nearby mountain resorts. When coalbed methane rigs rolled into town in the late '90s, they were at odds with Rifle's new amenities economy ("Colliding forces," HCN 9/25/2000). And in 2008, Tharp surveyed the damage of the growing gas boom: teachers are being driven away by rising housing costs, and roughnecks frequent a homeless shelter.

"Will today's influx of cash and commerce help lay the foundation for tomorrow's sustainable economy?" Tharp asked. "Or will the thousands of drill rigs and thousands more workers reduce the amenity economy — not to mention the landscape — to a shambles, like a tornado tearing through a trailer park?"

HCN has always basically stood by the hope that sustainable communities can fit with the Western landscape. But, then again, nothing makes headlines quite like a boom — or the inevitable bust.

Marshall Swearingen is a former HCN intern and Bozeman, Montana-based freelance writer who has read many dusty old editions of HCN.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryOilCoalNatural GasEconomyHistoryNot on homepage2015/03/17 10:30:00 GMT-6ArticleWhat’s in a kilowatt?http://www.hcn.org/issues/47.4/community-solar-comes-of-age-in-the-west/whats-in-a-kilowatt
A kilowatt (kW) is a measure of instantaneous use of electrical power. (Because electricity users are billed for the amount of total electrical energy they use over a period of time, they are billed in kilowatt-hours, or kWh.)

1,000 watts (W) = 1kW

1,000kW = 1 megawatt (1MW)

In Colorado, Xcel Energy’s largest coal-fired power plant can generate up to 1,400MW

A typical 250W solar panel can produce about 45kWh per month

To provide for its electrical consumption with community solar …

… an average Colorado residence would need a 16 solar panels, about 4kW

… a supermarket would need 3,200 panels, about 800kW

… the entire state of Colorado would need 112 million solar panels, about 28,000MW

Sources: Xcel Energy, U.S. Energy Information Administration

]]>No publisher2015/03/02 05:05:00 GMT-6Sidebar BlurbCommunity solar comes of age in the Westhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/47.4/community-solar-comes-of-age-in-the-west
A neighborhood solar experiment in Washington gains traction in other states.Nancy Lillquist was never optimistic that solar panels would work on her roof in Ellensburg, Washington, a college town on the Cascade Mountains’ dry eastern slope. The neighborhood’s big conifers blocked the sun. As a city council member, she noted the irony: Even as she and her fellow council members advocated for solar, they were also encouraging planting more trees for shade.

Then Lillquist found another option: In 2006, she invested $1,000 in a solar-powered renewable energy park the city’s utility had just built. The project, which would grow to 109 kilowatts over the coming years — enough to power a dozen homes — occupied open city-owned ground near soccer and baseball fields. Lillquist’s contribution paid for about one solar panel in the facility, whose output would earn her and about 100 other residents a credit on their utility bills.

When the Renewable Park came online, it was by many accounts the birth of “community solar.” The concept addresses a basic problem: While many homeowners support clean energy, the majority of residential rooftops lack sufficient solar exposure. Renters usually can’t install solar panels, no matter how sunny their rooftops, and some homeowners simply can’t afford them.

Ellensburg’s idealistic experiment cost more than $1 million to complete. And because the city bought in just before solar began a steep price drop, its solar electricity costs seven times more than the cheap local hydropower. Subscribers like Lillquist will probably never recoup their investments. Nevertheless, she says, “it feels good to make energy locally.”

“People were coming from all over the country to look at the project,” she says. Other cities followed Ellensburg’s lead. Municipal utilities in Ashland, Oregon, and St. George, Utah, soon created those states’ only community solar arrays. In 2007, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District filled its 1-megawatt community solar program — roughly nine times larger than Ellensburg’s — with 600 subscribers. More than 20 other Western utilities have since adopted shared solar, some with projects many times the size of Ellensburg’s.

Spurred by dramatically lower solar panel prices and rising demand, community solar “has reached a tipping point,” according to Becky Campbell, a senior researcher at the Solar Electric Power Association. That means solar energy is on the cusp of being available to everyone. But it also means that Ellensburg’s ideals are feeling the strain of going mainstream.

Nancy Lillquist at the Ellensburg, Washington, Renewable Park. Even though she paid a steep price as an early supporter of community solar, she’s still a big fan.

Katrinka Kalarchik

Community solar hasn’t had an easy path forward. Most people are served by for-profit, “investor-owned” utilities, which are accountable foremost to their shareholders and are heavily regulated by states. In those utilities’ territories, community solar frequently encounters “regulatory underbrush,” says Joseph Wiedman, a solar law expert representing the nonprofit Interstate Renewable Energy Council.

Some of that underbrush involves “net metering.” Forty-three states require investor-owned utilities to reimburse customers with solar on their property for the electricity they supply to the grid. But in most states those policies don’t apply to customers who fractionally invest in a community solar project. Some community solar organizers have instead tried to distribute the returns to their investors as cash — an approach that turns their projects into profit-seeking ventures and exposes them to securities laws. These projects have to register with state or federal authorities — a process that can cost anywhere from $100,000 to $1 million — or else apply for complicated exemptions that often require costly help from lawyers and accountants.

Even states that encourage community solar have problems. Linda Irvine and 35 residents of Whidbey Island, Washington, scraped together $430,000 to build a 50kW solar array near a community garden in 2011, selling the energy to the local utility and collecting a 2009 state incentive for community solar. But navigating tax laws and getting exemptions from securities laws made the whole experience “a bit overwhelming,” Irvine says.

The city of Portland, backed by the U.S. Energy Department, tried to build 80kW of shared solar in 2011, but the effort bogged down in state securities laws and other financing hurdles. Andria Jacob, who oversaw the project for the city, says: “You come up against too many barriers.”

A solar array at Taos Academy Charter School was one of New Mexico’s first community solar projects.

Courtesy Sol Luna Solar

By 2010, the price of solar panels was less than half of what it was in 2006, and consumer interest was growing. Community solar was poised to become a big business — if only someone could bring an easy, replicable model to utilities that might not otherwise take the initiative.

A company called Clean Energy Collective, founded in 2010, approached the local electric cooperative in rural northwestern Colorado and proposed a community solar project. Electric co-ops, like municipal utilities, have regulatory autonomy and a mandate to serve their members, and Clean Energy Collective made the utility an offer it couldn’t refuse: The company would build the project, assume the financial risk, even calculate the bill credits, as long as the utility agreed to buy the electricity and distribute the credits on customers’ bills.

Clean Energy Collective learned to navigate securities laws and claim federal tax credits, and built a 78kW solar array near the local wastewater treatment plant. The project turned a profit. Clean Energy Collective went on to partner with more rural co-ops, including one in New Mexico, where it created that state’s first community solar project for a Taos school in 2012.

It got a boost when a Colorado law, the “Community Solar Gardens Act,” cleared state regulators. The law, first passed in 2010, requires investor-owned utilities, including Colorado’s major utility, Xcel Energy, to build 6MW of community solar per year into their already existing state renewable mandate of 30 percent by 2020. It was the first legislation in the country to establish clear policies for how community solar should work. Between 2012 and 2015, Clean Energy Collective constructed 11 projects hooked to Xcel’s grid, most around 500kW in size — roughly five times bigger than Ellensburg’s Renewable Park. Colorado now leads the nation in community-owned solar, and 75 percent of the state’s electricity customers have access to a project.

That’s made Colorado into a model for other states. Passing laws like the Community Solar Gardens Act is probably the most direct way to expand community solar, says Wiedman.

But that’s “a pretty heavy lift,” he adds. Investor-owned utilities often resist, lobbying hard. In 2012, for example, California’s two biggest utilities crushed a bill that would require utilities to fold up to 2,000MW of shared solar into their renewable energy requirements. Advocates pushed through a more modest bill in 2013, paving the way for up to 600MW of shared solar in California by 2019.

Now, even investor-owned utilities are joining the community solar game, albeit on their own terms. “A lot of it is purely economics,” explains Jason Coughlin, a financial analyst for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Ellensburg’s Renewable Park cost more than $9 per watt, while today the installed cost of solar — solar-panel cost plus construction and permitting — has dropped to less than $3 per watt.

“Utilities feel a lot more comfortable with (community solar) now,” says Solar Electric Power Association’s Campbell, who’s working with more than 50 utilities now considering new programs.

Susannah Churchill, a policy director for the nonprofit advocacy group Vote Solar, says big utilities are also getting smarter. “(They’re) seeing that people want the ability to decide where their energy comes from,” she says. Unlike an individual homeowner’s rooftop solar, shared solar, if managed by the utility, lets the utility be the middleman and turn a profit.

Even Pacific Gas and Electric, one of California’s big three investor-owned utilities, proposed a community solar program while it fought the state’s shared solar law. To Churchill, the proposal was little more than another green power program, in which customers would pay a premium for generic solar energy from utility-solicited projects. PG&E continued to push that model as California’s Public Utilities Commission considered rules to implement the state’s 600MW of new shared solar, but Churchill and others pressed for options that would favor smaller and more local projects.

In January, California regulators issued a split decision: Utilities will be allowed to sell power from their shared solar projects, but they’re also now required to buy electricity from third-party developers like Clean Energy Collective that could site projects locally on brownfields or schools. The decision is “a really important moment” for shared solar as it expands across the country, Churchill says.

It’s also a nod to community solar’s hardscrabble roots in Ellensburg. After all, it was there that the ideal of not just clean, but local, energy took off in the first place.

]]>No publisherRenewable EnergySolar EnergyCommunitiesEnergy & Industry2015/03/02 05:05:00 GMT-6ArticleHow governments and others can gain accesshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/47.2/this-land-is-their-land/how-governments-and-others-can-gain-access
ESTABLISH HISTORIC PUBLIC-ACCESS RIGHTSLand agencies and others can prove an existing public-access easement by documenting that a road is a county road, for instance. Or they can ask a judge to issue a ruling in favor of “prescriptive” rights — access rights claimed through historic use — and thereby establish a new easement.

ACQUIRE LANDLand that links existing public land to public roads or trails can be purchased or donated, and agencies can also exchange public land for this purpose.

PURCHASE EASEMENTSEasements that give access along existing or new roads or trails can be purchased directly.

ESTABLISH RECIPROCAL EASEMENTSAgencies can grant private easements — if a landowner wants to build a road across public land to reach an inholding, for example — in exchange for a public easement, of similar value, across private land.

RE-ROUTE OR BUILD ROADS OR TRAILSAgencies can change access routes or build new routes in order to link to public land. This is costly and requires an environmental review under NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act.

ACQUIRE RIGHT OF WAY USING CONDEMNATIONUnder federal eminent domain laws, agencies can seize ownership of private roads or trails and compensate the landowners. This is used only as a last resort, or to encourage other options.

]]>No publisher2015/02/02 05:05:00 GMT-6Sidebar BlurbPrivate property blocks access to public landshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/47.2/this-land-is-their-land
Public lands belong to everyone. But private landowners can make it hard to get to them.“Isn’t that beautiful,” says Newmiller, grinning. A construction contractor and avid hunter, he’s driven an hour and a half from Billings, Montana, along with his 7-year-old daughter, Jordan, and his dad, Doug, a 40-year veteran at the local coal-fired power plant. In the coming weeks, they’re hoping to pack some horses into these mountains, maybe bag an elk. If, that is, they can get access.

“There’s a lot of elk at the top of Sweet Grass,” Newmiller says. “But there’s only one way in there” — thisroad, which threads through miles of private land (and multiple gates), before it enters the national forest. A half-mile shy of the forest boundary, there is a sign, installed by the owner of Sweet Grass Ranch, that reads: “This is not a trailhead. Private land, private road. ... Stop in at the main house to discuss access, parking, boundaries, any restrictions and to sign in.” For access between mid-September and May, it adds: “Please call first.”

Newmiller is edgy, thinking about last summer, when he came out to talk to ranch owner Tony Carroccia. He says Carroccia told him that he’d need written permission from the three other landowners along the road to get access during hunting season. Newmiller countered that he didn’t need their permission because this road is a public access — a claim he backs up with old Forest Service maps showing a public trailhead here, as well as evidence that the road once served a school. That’s when Carroccia “told me to get off his property,” Newmiller recalls. Carroccia denies that the incident took place.

As we rattle around a bend, we encounter the first gate, slung shut with a chain and padlocks. It reignites Newmiller’s irritation: “I’m just trying to access public lands,” he says. “You know — national forest. … They’ve got their own mountain land — they don’t need our public land on top of that.”

The scuffle over Sweet Grass Creek is part of a much larger struggle in the West. In Montana alone, more than a dozen access conflicts have flared up in recent years, as landowners gate off traditional access routes and effectively put hundreds of square miles of public land out of reach for people like Newmiller. Some conflicts, including the one here at Sweet Grass Creek, have smoldered for years or even decades. In many cases, landowners profit in various ways from the exclusive access to adjacent public land.

In an ideal world, anyone would be able to easily access the half-billion acres managed by the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and other federal agencies in the West. But I’m struck by how tenuous, even fragile, our connection to that land is — including the land in this particular corner of Montana, near my home in Bozeman: just thin threads of roads, where access often hangs more on the will of a landowner than on whether a road is truly public or private. Who gets to enjoy the benefits of public land, and at what cost, is more complicated than the crisply mapped property lines. And opening public access is always more difficult than closing it off.

Kyle Newmiller at home near Billings, Montana. He has been locked out of some of his favorite hunting spots by landowners who have blocked access to public land beyond their property.

Paul Ruhter

The roots of the problem reach back to the 1800s and early 1900s, when homesteaders carved out millions of acres from federal holdings in the West, forming rings of private land around islands of public land. And in what was probably the biggest giveaway of public resources in history, the federal government spurred westward settlement — and set the stage for innumerable future disputes — by dispensing sections (640-acre squares) to railroad companies, creating checkerboards of private land within those public-land islands.

For decades afterward, the public generally accessed public land on roads scraped in to serve homesteaders, miners and loggers. In those less-populous times, landowners were more tolerant of people crossing their property under informal, usually undocumented, arrangements. Today’s camo-garbed hunters and pole-toting hikers still rely to a surprising extent on those roads. And the need for more legally binding rights to use them has grown, as a rising tide of public-land users collides with a new generation of landowners.

I’d read about access fights farther afield in Montana, but as I scanned maps of the lands closer to Bozeman, the nearby Crazy Mountains looked ripe for conflict. Shooting skyward from the surrounding plains, the Crazies are ringed by private land. An additional 100 square miles of private land are checker-boarded throughout the range’s 270 square miles of public land. Trailheads dot the western front, but along the entire 25-mile eastern front, there’s only one established public trailhead, which the Forest Service secured in the 1950s after decades of landowner resistance. In at least four other drainages on that side of the Crazies, agency roads or trails dangle at the forest boundary, with no apparent public access. I home in on the biggest, Sweet Grass Creek, and soon learn from the Forest Service that more than 80 percent of the Crazies lacked “reasonable” public access as recently as the 1980s. Some in the agency even have their own nickname for the Crazies — “the final frontier.”

[SIDEBAR]

Bob Dennee knows this ground well. He exudes a weathered ease from his 39 years as a Forest Service land specialist and in other roles. His tenure began around the time the National Forest Management Act and other bedrock laws gave the Forest Service and BLM a broad directive to secure recreational public access. Though the agencies made some progress in the 1980s, Dennee points to a 1992 report by the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) that concluded that more than 50 million acres of Forest Service and BLM lands — about 14 percent of their holdings in the contiguous U.S., mostly in the West — had “inadequate” access. The report noted a growing problem: “Private landowners’ unwillingness to grant public access across their land” had increased over the previous decade, and sportsmen felt that landowners were “ ‘privatizing’ federal land for their own personal gain.”

Dennee is an optimist, though. “We’re making some gains,” he told me at the federal building in downtown Bozeman last June, shortly before he retired. He pointed to the Gallatin Forest’s 1987 Forest Plan, which identified 46 roads and trails, including Sweet Grass Creek, as the highest priority for securing access. Since then, Dennee and others have secured access at 23 of those. “But at the same time, land ownership changes,” Dennee said. “New landowners come in and say: ‘I don’t recognize that historic trail, I’m closing it.’ So we lose some ground.”

Nationwide, it’s hard to calculate how much progress has been made since 1992, because the agencies don’t track the amount of land that is not adequately accessible. One Forest Service official in Washington, D.C., estimates that as much as 20 million acres of the agency’s land still lack adequate access today. A 2013 report by the Center for Western Priorities, a Denver-based think tank, identified 4 million acres of Forest Service, BLM, state and other public lands, in six Western states, that were completely inaccessible. Montana had the largest share — nearly 2 million acres — of this “landlocked” public domain.

In Bozeman, Dennee spread a map across the table and described his biggest success — a massive land swap in the 1990s, when a cooperative Congress passed a bill consolidating tens of thousands of acres of old railroad checkerboard strewn across several mountain ranges in the Gallatin National Forest. “That resolved access across more than 150 miles of trail,” he said. A similar land deal in the ’90s, in which Dennee also played a major role, brought 39,000 acres of private checkerboard land in the northern Crazies under Forest Service ownership. He mentioned more success stories, including some that relied on productive partnerships with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, the state’s wildlife management agency, as well as with national nonprofits, including the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and The Trust for Public Land, and local access advocacy groups. “People do rally around access issues, and set aside their differences,” Dennee observed.

But the bad news is that partnerships are becoming more necessary as the Forest Service is hit with tighter budgets and staff reductions. Dennee can remember a time, as recently as a decade ago, when each of Montana’s eight national forests had a lands specialist dedicated to improving and safeguarding public access. Now only three staffers oversee access issues for the national forests and grasslands extending over the greater part of Montana and into North and South Dakota. Meanwhile, younger staffers coming up through the ranks lack the necessary expertise, he says.

“We have (many) willing landowners who want to work with us to resolve access needs,” Dennee told me, “but we can’t keep up with the demand.”

Bob Dennee negotiated many access deals during his 39 years with the U.S. Forest Service.

Adrian Sanchez-Gonzalez/Bozeman Chronicle

In Montana, the agencies have a tenacious ally that other Western states lack: the Public Land/Water Access Association (PLWA). Founded in 1986 by a retired Forest Service staffer, the all-volunteer group has a website that boasts of its “pit bull mentality” and lists dozens of battles it has waged against uncooperative landowners.

“The guys shutting off access to the public lands — it just didn’t sit good with me,” says Bernard Lea, who joined PLWA in the 1980s, while he was working as a Forest Service lands specialist. His home is surrounded by big cottonwoods, just off a commercial strip in Billings, and he jokes that his open-heart surgery the week before has “kind of backed up” a couple of access cases. He hands me a binder full of survey records, handwritten letters exchanged by ranchers and county clerks, homestead patents and other obscure legal documents — all evidence he gathered for the first access case he pursued for the Forest Service. It proved that a road — which had long given the public national forest access — had originally been approved and paid for by a local county government at the request of homesteaders in 1910. Therefore, a landowner’s attempt to close it was illegal.

Now, Lea trains other PLWA volunteers to do this work. In courthouse basements, they dust off thick tomes and read thousands of pages of county records, often having to decipher inscrutable cursive script. “You just about have to read it word for word,” Lea says, because the key details that could decide a case “come out of the blue.” Sometimes, the volunteers searching old archives come up empty-handed and resort to other tactics, merely documenting that the public has previously used now-contested routes, a basis for securing “prescriptive” access rights under Montana law.

Click on chart to view larger.

The work is tedious and sometimes takes decades to pay off, as it did in a struggle that began in 1997, when new landowners gated a road that historically provided public access to more than 25 square miles of national forest in the Absaroka Mountains, southeast of the Crazies. Backed by locals, PLWA and the Forest Service negotiated temporary easements that reopened the road until 2009, a period during which they hoped to secure permanent access. But their efforts failed, and in 2009, Dennee and other Forest Service officials initiated the process of seizing ownership of the road’s right-of-way under federal eminent domain laws — a long and costly procedure that must climb through every level of the agency to Washington, D.C., and then be approved by the secretary of Agriculture as well as by both houses of Congress. At the urging of Montana’s Sen. Jon Tester, D, and agency higher-ups, the landowners and the Forest Service agreed to construct a new road through both public and private land — another lengthy process, requiring environmental review. Now, more than 17 years after the original road was closed, the new one is nearly ready. The landowners, who paid for the portion of it across their property, “should be commended for working with us,” says Dennee.

Lea says the federal agencies often lack the resources or the will to pursue cases so aggressively. And he’s skeptical about other approaches, like the unsuccessful attempts by Sen. Tester and then-Rep. Steve Daines, R, (now a senator) to tap the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund to purchase more access from landowners. (The 2014 Farm Bill did allocate $20 million of similar funding.) Lea, who works as a real estate appraiser, says most landowners just aren’t interested in selling access: Private land near public land “has become so damned valuable,” he says. “You can buy 1,000 acres that borders national forest” where there’s no public access, and basically you’re getting that portion of the public land as part of the deal. “That’s what a lot of out-of-state people are looking for, limited deeded acres that they’re taxed on, and then they can (control) the access to the national forest.”

Public Land/Water Access picks its battles carefully, with most of its $40,000 annual budget going toward legal fees. “The agencies are doing what the politics will let them do,” says Lea. “We do what we can.”

That’s not enough, according to some conservationists. “Even when (PLWA) wins, they lose, because huge swaths of public land are off-limits for years” while a case is jammed in court, says Nick Gevock, conservation director for the Montana Wildlife Federation, which is partnering with PLWA in an effort to change some key state laws. One proposal would require landowners to prove that roads are private before closing them; another would increase the fine for illegal road closure from $10 to $500 per day. Gevock is careful to emphasize that hunters and other public-land users must respect private property, but adds: “There need to be some repercussions for people who try and privatize public lands.”

Paul Hansen allowed access to public lands through his Montana ranch until the costs became too high; he eventually sold public easements to his ranch roads to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

Marshall Swearingen

On the other side, private landowners often have good intentions, too. Until 2012, for instance, Paul Hansen allowed access through his Montana ranch to federal lands roughly 140 miles southwest of the Crazies. The ranch, which has been in his family for four generations, stretches 25 miles along a county road in a narrow valley bracketed by sagebrush foothills and timbered mountains. Several of its roads branch from the county road and climb into BLM land, with Forest Service land not far above. It’s prime elk-hunting territory, and during hunting season, Hansen allowed people to use his roads, which were never gated, and even hunt portions of his land; the rest of the year, he paid little attention to the issue. But the number of hunters grew each year until they became a problem.

Montana has a “block management” program that compensates landowners for providing public hunting access on their property. But when I meet Hansen on one of the few summer mornings when he’s not haying or moving cattle, he tells me how, in 2011, hundreds of hunters came through, maxing out the $12,000 he gets from the program. Their ATVs became a nuisance, spreading invasive knapweed. And the increase in traffic along the narrow gravel county road, which his kids drive every day to town or to pick up their own kids from school, was especially troubling. “You’d think this was the interstate out here,” he says. “It was like driving the gantlet.”

One November afternoon in 2010, when the county road was slick with new snow, Hansen’s daughter, Jody, was driving home in a bulky Chevy Suburban SUV. A jacked-up Dodge pickup, obviously speeding — one hunter driving and another in the passenger seat — fishtailed and collided head-on with the Suburban, plowing onto the hood within inches of the windshield. Pinned inside with broken ankles and a broken arm, Jody drifted in and out of consciousness for two hours as emergency responders cut her from the vehicle. A similar problem occurred the following year, during hunting season: A speeding pickup, presumably driven by a hunter, crested a hill and skidded sideways past Jody as she veered into the ditch. The driver didn’t stop. “It got to be too much,” Hansen says. “We said: ‘We’re done with this.’ ”

Click on chart to view larger.

So, in 2012, the Hansens dropped out of the state’s block management program and closed their private roads, cutting off access to the adjacent public land. Angry hunters complained to the BLM and the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks agency. Some were especially riled to learn that Hansen had leased exclusive hunting rights on his land to a neighbor, James Lincoln, a wealthy newcomer who owns a network of nursing homes in Missouri.

The BLM asked Hansen to reopen his roads, but he refused, so the agency moved ahead with a plan to open public access by re-routing sections of the county road through BLM land. Hansen realized that the access route would be restored, even if it cost the agencies, so he agreed to sell public easements on his roads. Fish, Wildlife and Parks paid Hansen $33,000 for the easements, securing much of the funding from the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and local sportsmen’s groups. The BLM opened the new, year-round access in time for the 2014 hunting season.

Back in the Crazies, Carroccia also talks about the darker side of public access. He sees his family’s control of the trailhead, going back to when they bought the ranch in 1965, as a stewardship role, needed “to preserve the place.” He spends much of his days patrolling and spraying for weeds, something he says the Forest Service doesn’t have the manpower for. “I don’t know what anybody gains with a (public) trailhead,” he says. “All we get is more vehicle traffic, more weeds, less beauty — less enjoyment for everybody.”

But like many landowners controlling public access, Carroccia also has a financial interest: He runs a guest ranch in addition to his family’s cattle business. The Sweet Grass Ranch website advertises several guest cabins and rooms, available for upwards of $1,750 per person per week, offering opportunities for horseback riding, hiking and fishing — flashing the scenic beauty of the Crazy Mountains and inviting guests to “trek into our backcountry to enjoy unspoiled high alpine lakes and jagged peaks,” some of which lie on his land, and some of which are in the national forest.

Although Carroccia says he allows access during hunting season if hunters have permission from the other landowners along the road, it’s not easy to get that permission. One of the landowners, Chuck Rein, who boasts about his ranch’s fourth-generation roots on his outfitting business website, charges up to $6,000 for multi-day hunts pursuing elk, deer and mountain goats, mostly on his land but also on the national forest, including up Sweet Grass Creek. When I phone Rein in August, he complains about being inundated with calls from hunters; over lunchtime, he’d already turned down three requests. He grants access to some hunters during the final days of the big-game hunting season, to hunt cow elk, and even sometimes hauls out their kills for them, he says. But Kyle Newmiller says Rein never returned his calls, and the locked gate we hit in October is on Rein’s land.

Tony Carroccia says, “We’re working hard to allow access, but keep a little bit of control.” The Forest Service maintains that it still has rights of public access here, because of previous public use and the history of the road, but the lack of a recorded public easement means that the landowners hold the cards for now. Carroccia’s policy, which requires hikers and horsepackers to sign in at his ranch house, makes it more difficult for the agency or Public Lands/Water Access to assert prescriptive access rights, because the signatures indicate that visitors are asking permission rather than freely using the route. It’s the kind of case that might be resolved only with a lawsuit triggered by cash-strapped PLWA or the Forest Service, or by an irate hunter cutting the locks.

The district ranger here, Alex Sienkiewicz, who earned a law degree before going to work for the Forest Service, is clearly doing the best he can. “The reality is we have to triage,” he says. For now, the agency is focused on more promising cases, like a potential land swap that would resolve an access dispute on the Crazies’ west side. As for Sweet Grass Creek, where the lines between public and private blur, “some of these cases sit in limbo for a long time,” he says.

Bernard Lea, retired from the U.S. Forest Service, now works with the Public Land/Water Access Association, training volunteers to search county records to document the historical ownership of roads.

Paul Ruhter

It’s a hot July day and I’m dodging cowpies on a faint trail that skirts the sharp front of Montana’s Madison Range, a string of 11,000-foot-plus peaks and alpine lakes towering above a river valley, southwest of the Crazies. I’m hiking toward Wolf Creek, a major drainage where a Forest Service trail climbs into the heart of this range. But already, as the sun starts to dip, I know I won’t make the 20 miles to Wolf Creek and back.

Getting to the trail at Wolf Creek would actually have been easy, if I’d been willing to trespass: A road from the highway leads directly to the trail, crossing the sprawling Sun Ranch, which borders 14 miles of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. As I piece together the Forest Service’s decades-long fight for access here, I uncover some incremental victories. But I also see more clearly how, once the public loses ground, it may be gone forever.

A 1964 map shows Forest Service roads crossing the Sun Ranch, leading not just to Wolf Creek but to two other drainages to the south. Jack Atcheson Jr., who grew up hunting this area with his dad, remembers the access at Wolf Creek as being “as good as a trailhead” into the 1960s. “I’d leave my camper trailer there for three weeks,” he says.

Montana-style humor marks a private property boundary.

Courtesy Public Land/Water Access Association

PLWA

The Forest Service tried for decades to secure public access across the Sun Ranch, which borders 14 miles of national forest in southwest Montana. A road that crosses the ranch’s southern corner is the only public access to this part of the Madison Range today.

Marshall Swearingen

But by the 1970s, the Sun Ranch owners were tightening access — perhaps at first by more strictly requiring permission, as happened at Sweet Grass Creek. Like Sweet Grass Creek, these roads had apparently never been formalized as public-access routes. By the late ’70s, there was no secured access along this 20-mile section of the Madison front. Atcheson, who was by that time guiding clients into Wolf Creek as an outfitter, using a less direct access road on a neighboring ranch with the landowner’s permission, urged then-District Ranger Vergil Lindsey to help turn the tide. “I could see (the access) drying up for everyone,” he says.

Lindsey took a collaborative approach, rather than asserting prescriptive rights based on prior access. But progress was slow, and complicated by the transfer of the Sun Ranch into new hands. In 1978, it sold to Southern California banker and real estate developer Ted Gildred and his partner, Bill Poole, the first in a string of wealthy owners who would come to include a major mining company CEO, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and action-movie star Steven Seagal. Lindsey increased his efforts and by the early ’80s made a breakthrough: Gildred and Poole agreed to a trailhead access at Papoose Creek — about 10 miles from Wolf Creek, across the ranch’s southern corner. That significantly improved access along the Madison front, but Lindsey was disappointed that he couldn’t do more. What killed a more ambitious deal? Lindsey says that the forest supervisor, shying from confrontation, “just ran backwards.”

The Papoose Creek agreement included a Forest Service promise to back off its pursuit of Wolf Creek for 10 years. But when the 10 years had passed, then-District Ranger Mark Petroni resumed Lindsey’s fight, despite the landowner’s opposition. The agency worked with PLWA to dig deeper into the legal history of the road, but “there was nothing,” says Petroni. “There really wasn’t any option other than condemnation, and the political stars wouldn’t align.”

Determined hunters still trekked to Wolf Creek on a faint and unofficial trail, which scrambled over difficult terrain to avoid trespassing on the Sun Ranch. After 2008, when Sun Ranch owner Roger Lang donated an easement, the Forest Service constructed a more moderate trail between Papoose Creek and Moose Creek, the middle of the three drainages. As I hike that trail today, it still fights the foothills topography, diving and climbing over several other drainages. In some places, it’s nearly illegible from disuse.

Ironically, even agency staffers have welcomed this outcome. Jonathan Klein, who served as the district’s wilderness manager until he retired in 2012, believes, as do some local hunters, that this area is better off now because the wildlife get a break and those humans who do visit have a chance for solitude. “You’re not going to go there unless you’re really into it,” he says. “You don’t have to have a trailhead at the mouth of every drainage.”

It’s a good point. And it’s the main justification that the Forest Service now gives for apparently abandoning the fight for access to Wolf Creek. But it grates against another chapter in the Sun Ranch’s history, one that underscores how, in the end, the struggle isn’t just about whether there’s access — it’s about who has access, and whether that access is in the spirit of public ownership.

In 1978, as Gildred was preparing to buy the Sun Ranch, Florida attorney Hamilton Kenner swooped in to buy the ranch himself. Kenner then flipped the ranch to Gildred, but not before piecing off sections on its north end, adjacent to the national forest near Wolf Creek. He subdivided that land, branded the development as Rising Sun Mountain Estates, and marketed it with bylaws and covenants specifying that anyone who bought in would have access to the national forest. All the lots sold.

Several of those properties are again for sale today, even as the fight for access at Wolf Creek fades from public memory. The listings advertise “exclusive hunting rights in the area with common access to the forest land,” and go even further: “A locked gate at the entrance protects that exclusivity. … No public access into this part of the Wilderness for miles in either direction.”

For decades Bill Orsello’s family used a road passing through private land to access national forest near Helena, Montana. Because the Forest Service didn’t have a public easement on the road, it was legal for the landowner to lock a gate and block public access.

Dylan brown/Helena Independent Record

Kyle Newmiller sits in his idling truck, staring at the locked gate on the road up Sweet Grass Creek. “Someone should come up here and say: ‘If we catch you locking this gate, we’re going to write you a ticket.’ … What is the hold-up?” he says. He’s already talked to District Ranger Sienkiewicz and Public Lands/Water Access. Now he considers his more immediate options: Return to Rein’s house and hassle him for permission; go back into town and report to the county, where Tony Carroccia’s brother-in-law is the county attorney; or maybe get out of the truck and cut the locks himself.

The hold-up is this: No matter how frustrated Newmiller is, this road — like all others — is private until proven or made public. And the hold-up can last for decades: For 30 years, a road 120 miles west of here was gated, blocking access to nearly 20 square miles of Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest that are otherwise hard to reach. Only in recent years did the county uncover clear evidence that the road was public, prompting county commissioners to personally cut the locks on that gate in 2012. The landowners took the case to court, and the judge upheld the public right of way.

Newmiller turns the pickup around, and we drive back through the cottonwoods along the creek. In the nearest town, Big Timber, we pull into a gravel lot where state wildlife officials are checking hunters’ kills. A game warden, bundled up against the cold wind, comes up to talk to Newmiller. It’s a continuation of the talk they had earlier this morning, when Newmiller asked about access at Sweet Grass Creek; now, he tells the warden about the gate. The warden clearly also believes the public should have access there, but his words are carefully vague. If anything, I think, he’s egging on Newmiller. He says, “Somebody’s gotta do it. … Somebody’s gotta go in there and say ‘(is this a public access), yes or no?’ ”

Newmiller knows he could be that “somebody,” blazing his own path and personally shouldering the costs, which are unknown but daunting. “That’s what’s so frustrating,” he tells me. “Everyone sits back like it’s no big deal. When does somebody do something about it?”

The Crazy Mountains near Clyde Park, Montana. The mountains lie within the Lewis and Clark and Custer Gallatin national forests, but parts of the forests are hard to get to because they’re surrounded by private land.

This coverage is supported by contributors to the High Country News Enterprise Journalism Fund.

]]>No publisherPublic LandsPeople & PlacesPoliticsRecreation2015/02/02 05:05:00 GMT-6ArticleMapping threats on public landhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.18/incidents-map
Intimidation of federal officials is widespread across the West

From thousands of pages of official reports, we’ve culled dozens of the worst incidents and summarized each one. We passed over the ordinary rowdy encounters with inebriated civilians, focusing on the serious confrontations with anti-government overtones. All mapped incidents have occurred since 2010 and only represent those most egregious and reported. Many incidents go unreported.

Hover over the dots on the map to read an excerpt from the incident. Click on the dots to access the full incident as a PDF.

]]>No publisherPoliticsBureau of Land ManagementU.S. Forest ServicePublic LandsDefuse the West2014/10/27 10:35:00 GMT-6ArticleDefuse the Westhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.18/defuse-the-west
Public-land employees are easy targets for a violent, government-hating fringe. One bullet smacked the hood of Brunk’s truck close to where he was sitting in the cab. Another shattered Rinehart’s windshield, temporarily blinding him with fragments of glass. As the shooter drove away, Brunk raced after him. Rinehart followed as soon as he cleared his eyes, and later squeezed off a dozen shots with his AR-15 rifle, putting holes in the shooter’s truck. But the man escaped.

Five days later, 69-year-old Tracy Levi Thibodeaux, a former building inspector, was arrested at a rural post office while picking up his Social Security check. Investigators sifted through his history to determine why he’d shot at the rangers. Apparently, the economic recession had pushed him over the edge; he blamed the federal government for some of his problems and thought that it was harassing him, even trying to kill him. He’d frequently expressed anti-government views, calling talk-radio shows and writing letters to newspapers. Initially, he was found mentally unfit for trial, but that decision was later reversed, and in 2013, he was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to prison.

Thibodeaux’s eruption, though remarkable for its violence, was by no means rare. In recent years, other angry Westerners have fired guns at federal employees and even hurled firebombs at campground hosts. Verbal threats and ugly altercations have occurred with disturbing regularity, as government folks were hit with these insults and worse: “You stupid whore!” ... “You better not write me a ticket! I’ll kick your fucking ass!” ... “There is a bullet with your name on it.” ... “Fuck you, you fucking faggots.”

We know about these incidents, and more, because High Country News has launched a sweeping investigation to unearth the official reports, using the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA. We’ve focused on threats and violence against employees of two key federal agencies — the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management — both on- and off-duty, from 2010 to early 2014. The agencies have not yet provided HCN with all of the information we’ve requested, but what they’ve divulged so far reveals an ominous pattern of hostility toward government employees.

Of course, such sentiments have smoldered in the West for a long time. History and geography conspired to endow our region with most of the nation’s federal land, and Westerners have responded to the federal presence with both appreciation and hatred. For the thousands of workers tasked with managing the federal lands, enforcing laws and regulations can be dangerous. A few years before Thibodeaux shot at the BLM rangers, for instance, a ranching patriarch in the same area, Luther Wallace “Wally” Klump, refused to obey BLM regulations on cattle on federal land and was jailed for contempt of court. Klump warned The New York Times in 2004 that he might pick up a gun to battle the feds: “The Second Amendment is my ace, and they know it’s my ace. The founding fathers gave the individual a gun to fight the tyranny of the government. What’s that mean? The bearer can kill someone in government if the reason is justified. But it’s never been tested. I told them, you take those cows, I’ll kill you as mandated by the Second Amendment.”

The most extreme anti-federal flare-ups — like the one earlier this year in Nevada, when rancher Cliven Bundy and his gun-toting supporters faced off with armed BLM employees over grazing regulations — garner national headlines. When the BLM tried to round up Bundy’s cattle for trespassing on federal land, some of Bundy’s crew took up sniper positions and threatened to shoot it out, so the BLM temporarily backed off to avoid bloodshed. Right-wing talk shows instantly jumped to Bundy’s defense, lauding him as a hero fighting federal oppressors. HCN’s own investigation began well before Bundy made headlines, because we’d already observed the rising tension and suspected that similar incidents occur pretty much daily without ever making the news.

Paul Lachine

In December 2012, HCN’s then-online editor, Stephanie Paige Ogburn, filed a single Freedom of Information request for reports of harassment of BLM employees in southern Utah. She turned up several incidents, including one in which an all-terrain-vehicle driver, apparently angry over the BLM banning motors on some trails, used his machine to tear up the yard of a BLM employee’s home. This January, we expanded our investigation, seeking reports from more than a hundred BLM and Forest Service offices from Alaska to New Mexico. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, in the Washington, D.C., area, offered guidance on tracking down public records, and Marshall Swearingen, HCN’s Freedom of Information project manager, handled most of our communication with the agencies.

From thousands of pages of official reports, we’ve culled dozens of the worst incidents and summarized each one. We passed over the ordinary rowdy encounters with inebriated civilians, focusing on the serious confrontations with anti-government overtones.

We’re letting the official reports do most of the talking. Though they’re prone to bureaucratic language and censored to preserve the privacy of individuals who were involved, they provide vivid, and often frightening, snapshots from the West’s front lines.

We’ve also created a map locating the worst incidents and links to PDFs of the official reports.

From conversations with Forest Service, BLM, National Park Service and other federal employees, we know that many incidents go unreported. So we invite anyone who has information to contact us, using a special tipster form on the web page. We’ll consider investigating any tips we receive, and we promise not to reveal the tipster’s identity.

By highlighting the danger that federal employees face, we hope to put those who foment the hostility on notice: It’s time to rein it in before more people get hurt. Range magazine editors and writers covering the Bundy standoff, for instance, didn’t help matters by describing the BLM as a communist and “eco-jihad” force that uses “potentially murderous aggression” to drive ranchers off federal land. They also praised “the everyday Americans showing up from all around the West ... bearing semiautomatic .223 rifles” to resist the BLM’s “jihad.”

Other irresponsible pundits include some of the talking heads on Fox News, who embraced Bundy’s armed rebellion and his claims that federal land and related regulations are an illegal imposition on Westerners. Sean Hannity, a Fox celebrity who also hosts a nationwide radio show, compared Bundy’s rebellion to our nation’s 1776 war for independence from British rule: “We would never (have) won any of these wars from the Revolutionary War on up if we didn’t have faith and courage and fighting for something.”

Those who should rein it in also include Utah’s Garfield County Commissioner Leland Pollock, who told a congressional hearing in July that, “Right or wrong, some equate BLM’s law enforcement operations to the Gestapo of the World War II era.” That comparison basically encourages Westerners to take up arms against BLM employees the same way that heroes resisted Nazi genocide of European Jews.

The vast majority of Westerners respect the role of government and are willing to work with federal employees to solve our region’s problems. We hope to encourage them to speak out for civility and reasonableness. There’s more than enough violence and extremism in the world today. Let’s do our part to try to defuse the West.

This coverage is supported by contributors to the High Country News Enterprise Journalism Fund. Map created by Brian Calvert and Marshall Swearingen.

Ray Ring is an HCN senior editor based in Bozeman, Montana. Marshall Swearingen is a former HCN intern, now serving as HCN’s FOIA project manager and freelancing; he’s also based in Bozeman.

]]>No publisherPublic LandsNational Park ServiceBureau of Land ManagementPoliticsRanchingU.S. Forest ServiceDefuse the West2014/10/27 04:00:00 GMT-6ArticleRelated stories in this issuehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.18/reports-from-the-front-lines/related-stories-in-this-issue
Defuse the West

]]>No publisher2014/10/27 04:00:00 GMT-6Sidebar BlurbReports from the front lineshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.18/reports-from-the-front-lines
Excerpts from official accounts of threats against U.S. Forest Service and BLM employees. Someone fired seven rifle shots at a uniformed Forest Service fire-prevention employee driving an agency pickup in California’s Tahoe National Forest. “The firefighter reported seeing three (suspects) above the roadway on an open embankment, one of which was holding a rifle. ... The firefighter then observed (the rifleman) raise the rifle and point it at him inside his USFS vehicle. The firefighter quickly backed his vehicle away (and heard) two shots fired. As the firefighter continued backing away from the scene ... he heard five more shots fired.” Investigators found footprints and spent rifle cartridges, but never cracked the case. —July 28, 2010

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A “loud and confrontational” man walked into a BLM office in Moab, Utah, on two days and repeatedly threatened to kill and beat up men and women working there. He was upset over road closures and charged that “everyone here is a tree-hugger.” Waving his arms angrily, he said he was a Vietnam War vet “trained to kill people” and wanted to “break some bones. ... Come outside, we’ll settle this.” One employee reported, “I got scared and ran to the back office (thinking) he was going to explode.” They locked the office after he left, fearing he would return with a gun. Later, he told a sheriff’s deputy that “on occasion he rides his ATV out on a ridge and waits with his .300 Winchester rifle for a BLM employee to drive by” and that he “knows where to dispose of bodies so they will not be found.”—Oct. 13-15, 2010

•••

The Idaho state director of the Bureau of Land Management was threatened during the annual Governor’s Trail Ride. Federal, state and local officials, led by Republican Gov. Butch Otter, gathered in Owyhee County for the ride and its forum on “public land issues.” One speaker — an anti-federal activist from Elko County, Nevada — “bashed” the BLM over sage grouse management. Then the activist approached the Idaho BLM director in an “aggravated” manner, wagging his finger and complaining that the agency’s grouse concerns had hampered wind farm development and oil and gas drilling. The activist told the BLM director that “he had better not show his face in Elko County.”

During the forum, there was also talk of throwing a rope over a tree branch and hanging someone; the name of the target, apparently a government official, was redacted in the incident report. —June 27, 2012

•••

[SIDEBAR]

Ranchers confronted Forest Service employees trying to keep cattle out of a fenced riparian area in New Mexico’s Lincoln National Forest. The employees felt “uneasy” because the ranchers were “huddled up” at their two pickup trucks and had apparently tied back the fence to keep it open “as if to send a message.” One rancher was “very aggressive in his demeanor ... taking a fighting stance,” and shouting, “Fuck you, you fucking faggots.” One or more of the ranchers also hollered, “I can’t believe you’re fencing out my cows because of some stupid mouse (probably a species protected by the Endangered Species Act). ... That gate is going to stay open.”

As the employees retreated in a Forest Service truck, one or more ranchers drove after them, screaming obscenities: “Fucking faggots ... fucking pussies, pull over (and) get out of the truck. We are going to settle this right now. ... Let’s go, right here!” —May 17, 2013

•••

A man harassed a female Forest Service employee shopping in a rural grocery store near La Pine, Oregon, saying “how corrupt the government was,” and adding that the next time he “saw a government truck unattended (he) would make sure it would not make it back to the Forest Service compound.” He also accused her of conspiring to start wildfires. The employee, who was “visibly very upset,” feared the man might do her “physical harm.” —Aug. 23, 2010

•••

In a Forest Service office in Sandpoint, Idaho, “an individual came into the front desk area ... loud and upset ... threatening us with having targets on our backs and starting civil war if Obama wins re-election. ... He threatened to shoot Forest Service employees (and said he) has many friends in the area who would like to shoot some Forest Service workers. ... This went on for an estimated 30 minutes.” —Oct. 18, 2012

•••

Someone threw a firebomb at BLM campground hosts in the Wildwood Recreation Site near Oregon’s Mount Hood. “Two BLM recreation site hosts ... were performing campsite duties and traveling in a golf cart (when they) heard a loud noise and the sound of shattered glass. They pulled over ... and discovered the remnants of a Molotov cocktail. There was a sock, which was used as a wick, still burning, diesel fuel and a broken Corona glass bottle. (They) realized this device had been thrown at them.”

It wasn’t the campground’s first firebomb: “Previously that morning, two other devices were found by a BLM employee on the pavement in the same area. ... These devices were constructed in the same manner as the Molotov cocktails thrown at the campground hosts. ... There is a history of vandalism, trespass, dumping and destruction of vegetation in the wooded area near the incident site.” —July 24, 2013

•••

A man made an anonymous phone call to a Forest Service employee’s home in Townsend, Montana: The employee’s wife “answered the phone at her personal residence, where she resides with her husband and their children. A male with a foreign accent asked, ‘Can I speak with (the employee)?’ (She) advised that he was not available and asked to take a message. The male stated, ‘Yes, I am going to hunt him down and kill him.’” —Aug. 27, 2013

•••

A 6-foot-2-inch tall suspect, probably male (the name was redacted on the report), walked into the Methow Valley Ranger Station of the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in central Washington, upset about logging-permit procedures. He “became frustrated and started saying something about being a member of possibly an anti-government group (and) said that they were going to take back the federal land.” He also said that he “should go out and get what he wanted and take a chance of getting a ticket.” Then he raised his voice and “made a gun gesture” toward a law-enforcement officer. —Oct. 1, 2012

•••

An off-duty BLM employee, who was having a drink with friends in a northern Idaho bar, was approached by a man who “started giving him grief about a recently fenced-off area” managed by the BLM. Later that evening, the man threw a salt shaker at the BLM employee, hitting him in the chest. —Feb. 4, 2011

•••

In Arizona’s Prescott National Forest, a man became angry when he was approached by a female Forest Service fire-prevention employee checking for abandoned campfires: He yelled obscenities and “began revving his engine and jerking his vehicle backward and forward.” He said he would “shoot down” any law enforcement officers who pulled guns on him and repeated the threat several times. The employee “felt very intimidated and concerned for her safety (and) the safety of other Forest Service employees.” —Aug. 30, 2010

•••

One snowy day, when a Forest Service employee in Montana’s Beaverhead Deer Lodge National Forest told a snowmobiler not to enter a closed area at a trailhead, the “violator cussed at FS employee and drove sled into closure anyway.” —April 22, 2010

•••

Two drug traffickers threatened a BLM employee in a sports bar in Carlsbad, New Mexico. The employee reported: “I was on the patio (of the bar) when I was approached by a Hispanic male ... no visible tattoos, no scars, and no distinguishing features. He said he knew who I was and that I needed to work with them to smuggle drugs in a government vehicle. He said I would make $5,000 a run. I told him I would not do it. ... He left and returned in a few minutes with a second Hispanic male ... The first male said I needed to work with them or they would kill me and my family. I again repeated that I would not work with them. The second male hit me across the bridge of my nose. I threw a few punches and took off running ... across the parking lot.” —Aug. 22, 2013

•••

A man walked into the Council Ranger District office of Payette National Forest in Idaho and “made comments regarding shooting people, which the employees interpreted to mean that (he) was threatening to shoot Forest Service employees.” He was upset about road closures in the forest, and said: “This is our forest. You have no right to close roads. ... We are getting fed up. ... This is going to go to war and we’ll start shooting if it keeps up.” And he asked them if they’d heard about a Forest Service employee in Utah who got “blowed away.”

When law enforcement officers later questioned the man, he “differentiated between shooting people that may only wound them, and killing them. (He) stated that he was not planning to shoot or kill anyone, but he wanted to get the Forest Service’s attention, so he planned the incident.” —Sept. 29, 2010

•••

After a Forest Service employee in Lemmon, South Dakota, reported him for violating regulations, a man told the employee’s wife that he was going to “kick (the employee’s) ass.” He called the employee a “son of a bitch” and said, “The Forest Service needs to get their ass out of this country!” When he was issued a citation for his threats, he said, “I am not going to pay it. ... You better have a goddamn good lawyer.” —Sept. 28, 2010

•••

People who brought horses into a prohibited area of Montana’s Gallatin National Forest threatened the Forest Service employee who spoke to them about it. One “became very argumentative and (said) that he had been coming up there for 50 years.” Another “walked over with a very large alcoholic mixed drink” and “became very loud, argumentative and hostile” and “threw down his mixed alcohol drink and squared off in a hostile and assaultive posture,” calling the employee a “Tree Cop” and saying, “I could have gotten a gun out and killed you.”—Sept. 6, 2013

•••

A “crazy guy” called a BLM office in Bishop, California, and “wouldn’t stop calling” for two days. He “called the front desk employees liars and told (name redacted), ‘I’m going to come over there and hurt you.’ ... (He) called the employees lying bitches and said, ‘I’m going to shut you up.’” —Aug. 16, 2013

•••

A man aimed a rifle at a Forest Service employee who tried to handcuff the man’s wife in the Little Belt Mountains in Montana’s Lewis and Clark National Forest. The couple had driven into a prohibited area while deer hunting. The woman, who refused to show her hunting license, said she “did not have to put up with Gestapo government officials.” When the Forest Service employee tried to handcuff her, she resisted, and then, as the employee later reported: “I noticed (the suspect) on top of the hill with a rifle. (He) was yelling ‘Hey, get the fuck away from my wife.’ He repeated this several times (holding his rifle) at chest and shoulder height directed toward me. ... I felt extremely threatened.” —Nov. 26, 2011

•••

An intoxicated man threatened Forest Service employees during a public meeting about the pine-beetle epidemic in Black Hills National Forest in South Dakota. He “interrupted the meeting on several occasions by verbally expressing (a negative) opinion of the U.S. Forest Service through profanity and open-ended, unspecific threats holding the (agency) responsible for the pine-beetle epidemic.”

Later that evening, as the man was being arrested on suspicion of drunk driving, he again mentioned his “dislike of the U.S. Forest Service and its employees,” saying that he would not want “to kill anyone without good reason, but some individuals need to be dealt with.” He had “an extensive criminal history dating back to 1978 for DWI, Assault, Drug Use and Resisting Arrest.” —Oct. 27, 2011

•••

A man scuffled with two BLM employees who wanted to cite him for not having a proper ATV registration on a back road in the mountains near Silverton, Colorado. This confrontation began when the BLM employees, driving marked agency ATVs, stopped a group of off-road vehicle drivers. The man refused to climb off his ATV, so they wrestled him to the ground and handcuffed him. In the melee, he hit one BLM employee on the head and tried to grab one by the groin, saying things like: “I will fuck your world up ... Fuckin’ got a hard-on right now I bet ... queer-ass piece of shit ... let me touch your wiener.” —July 6, 2012

•••

Paul Lachine

A man indirectly threatened Forest Service employees while talking with someone else in Buffalo Gap National Grassland in South Dakota: He pulled out a .45-caliber pistol and said, “This is for the Forest Service”and “called the Forest Service ‘sons a bitches’ and asked ‘are you gonna help me fight them? ... They are taking over everything.’” —April 16, 2010

•••

A female Forest Service employee reported an altercation with a man who appeared to be involved in locking a public road in Rio Grande National Forest in Colorado: “At this gate I found a chain and two locks, neither of which were a Forest Service lock. ... A Jeep came down the road and parked in the middle of the road. ... As I stood next to the Jeep holding the chain and locks (a young man driving the Jeep) started to pull (the chain and locks) away from me.”

As the confrontation escalated, the Forest Service employee reported, “I became concerned that if (he) gained possession of the chain/locks he would be able to swing them out the Jeep window and hit me in the head. ... I grabbed his wrist trying to keep control... (He) repeatedly stated we were not going up that road, that (he) had orders to stop anyone from going up that road, it was private property. ... (He) also made numerous comments about suggested sexual encounters he would recommend for me to help the situation (i.e. go find a boyfriend to fuck or a husband to fuck or maybe I’d be happier with other females) along with other derogatory statements toward me.” —June 8, 2012

•••

A man wrote a 117-page letter threatening Forest Service employees in White River National Forest in Colorado: The signed, hand-written letter made “accusations” against the Forest Service, including a female employee described as “Little Smokey Bear Girl,” as well as a former sheriff, calling them all “homosexual freaks” involved in a “faggot bastard secret society” that is conspiring to murder people. The man had a history of stalking people and threatening to burn down their homes. —Oct. 21, 2011

•••

Two men on horseback argued with a mounted Forest Service employee about constitutional issues, miles into Wyoming’s Washakie Wilderness in Shoshone National Forest: The confrontation began when the employee “asked the two men if there was an emergency, if anything was wrong. ... The first man asked what right (the employee) had to ask them who they were.” The employee told them, “I am plainly in uniform, I see two men trotting down the trail, maybe something is wrong.” The first man answered, “You feds think you have authority over everything in Wyoming. I will not tell you anything.”

The first man then “burst out” with “you are a good example of the feds overreaching” and “continued to explain the Wyoming Constitution and how the feds did not have authority in the state of Wyoming.” So the Forest Service employee “began a conversation about the federal U.S. Constitution.” After several minutes of disagreement over which constitution was the law of the land, the employee asked the man for an I.D.; the man refused to comply.

The Forest Service employee suspected that bighorn sheep were being illegally hunted in the area and asked the men if they owned a truck and horse trailer with expired license plates at the trailhead. They refused to answer, again saying that “states rights” trumped the federal government. “The conversation went silent.” Ultimately, the employee told them to “have a good day” and rode off to meet a state game warden deeper in the backcountry. —Oct. 19, 2012

•••

In the public-comment process for a BLM plan to round up wild horses in Wyoming, a wild-horse advocate sent a lengthy email to BLM employees, saying: “You sick bastards ought to be killed. ... We are so goddamned sick of your cruelty to our American wildlife. ... Fuck you go to hell where u bastards deserve (to be) terrified tortured and hung upside down (and) may your families be tortured.” —Sept. 17, 2013

•••

When two Forest Service employees driving ATVs on a road in Bighorn National Forest near Ten Sleep, Wyoming, approached a slow-moving Chevy pickup, the driver swerved repeatedly to prevent them from passing. Eventually, the pickup driver stopped and “grabbed (one Forest Service employee) by the throat,” saying the feds “did not own the road.” —Oct. 15, 2012

•••

An Arizona man, inspired by an anti-Forest Service newspaper column, threatened employees of several national forests in the state. He was “upset about road closures, wilderness restrictions and other regulations,” and wrote (with little attention to grammar) that there will be “an all out revolt from Hunters, Campers and Prospectors in every state ... quit closing the access to already existing roads & trails or there’s going to be an all-out war against you ie the U.S. Forest Service, Bullets ... and people dieing ... So Don’t Tread On Me (and) My Rights to make use of my state & my Country Or there will be trouble I Guarantee you!” Previously, he’d been convicted of stalking and harassment. —Dec. 13, 2010

•••

An oilfield worker threatened an off-duty BLM employee during a birthday celebration for the employee’s wife in a bar in Kemmerer, Wyoming. The employee had previously cited the man for violating oilfield regulations. In the bar, the man showed a lot of “animosity” and repeatedly told the employee to “watch (your) back, ‘cause I’m coming after you.” He also repeatedly rubbed the employee’s wife’s arm in a way that made her feel threatened. —Jan. 31, 2012

•••

An angry man threatened Forest Service employees in the Ashton, Idaho, office of Caribou-Targhee National Forest: “Customer came in office with an attitude against the govt ... cursing the govt, saying it was all his forest, all would be shot.” —Oct. 17, 2012

•••

An inebriated man who’d gotten his pickup stuck on a rough road in Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest in Bear Lake County, Idaho, yelled obscenities at a Forest Service road-grader crew, complaining that they weren’t smoothing the road properly. When the man tried to pull the driver of the road-grader out of the cab, the driver, a Forest Service employee, kicked and punched him to keep him at bay.

Later that day, the same man drove a Ford Bronco at another Forest Service employee who approached him in a campground. That employee “heard the man’s (Bronco) accelerate and ... saw the man looking right at him,” but dodged the Bronco.

When that employee climbed into a Forest Service truck to give chase, the Bronco’s driver turned around and aimed at the Forest Service truck “at high rate of speed.”The employee “anticipated a collision and put his vehicle into park and put (his) foot on the brake and leaned back to prepare for impact.” The Bronco driver swerved at the last second and clipped the side and front of the Forest Service truck, causing more than $1,000 in damage. —Aug. 5, 2010

•••

A man in a white pickup made threatening gestures at an off-duty BLM ranger driving a marked BLM vehicle toward the Burning Man Festival in northwest Nevada. The man drove beside the employee’s vehicle, matching its speed while “deliberately making motions of a hand-gun firing” seven to 10 times. Eventually the employee pulled in front of the pickup, and the man began “yelling and screaming” and “swerving back and forth, almost hitting (the BLM) vehicle.” —Aug. 27, 2010

•••

An angry man threatened a Forest Service employee who was preparing to drive a snowmobile up a trail in the Greys River Ranger District of Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming. The employee reported, “I noticed a red Subaru heading towards me very quickly (in the parking lot at the trailhead) ... When (the Subaru) came to an abrupt stop next to my truck, I was immediately asked in an angry and confronting manner how much it would f-ing cost to snowmobile up the river ... he wanted to f-ing know how much he was paying as a taxpayer for me to ‘joy-ride’ up the river. I explained to him that I don’t ‘joy-ride,’ I perform safety patrols, compliance checks on regulations, winter closure checks etc., when he interrupted me and said that I was f-ing stupid.”

The man “then said that (another Forest Service employee) was a f-ing jerk too ... he hoped (the other employee) was ‘f-ing 6 feet underground where he deserves’ and ... knew a lot of other people that hoped (the employee) was ‘f-ing dead too, all of you.’ ... (He) continued to shout expletives at me. ... I said to have a good day, and he sped out of the parking lot shouting f-you.” —April 16, 2010

•••

An unidentified man phoned the Toiyabe National Forest office in Sparks, Nevada, to “complain about wilderness reservation procedures. ... He became hostile and made comments such as: ‘It was (his) job in life to take down Forest Service offices any way he could.’ Also that it was his ‘duty to make it hard for Forest Service offices and people in any way he could.’ Also, that the Forest Service ‘wastes people’s time and money, and takes away their rights.’ ... The voice sounded similar to a voice message left during Christmas time in which the caller used profanity on the Forest Service answering machine.” —March 18, 2011

•••

A man called and threatened a female BLM employee in the agency’s office in Dickinson, North Dakota. He wanted the BLM to give his wife $5,000 that the agency had collected from a drilling company operating on her land -- apparently a penalty for improper drilling -- but when the employee explained that the BLM intended to keep the money, he told her that he would “take it up the old-fashioned Indian way” by shooting her with a shotgun. The investigation found that he was a “convicted felon with an extensive criminal history.” —Nov. 29, 2011

•••

An irate man grabbed the arm of a male Forest Service employee at a public meeting in Arcadia, California, trying to get his attention. The man followed the employee outside the meeting, “shaking his finger in (the Forest Service employee’s) face in a very persistent manner that appeared threatening.” A Forest Service law enforcement officer who observed the confrontation told the man to “back off.” —May 30, 2012

•••

Someone sent an anonymous letter to the Cleveland National Forest headquarters in Southern California, threatening to kill any employees involved in a decision to allow construction of a power line through the forest. The letter said, “You (a specific employee) are the main target. ... Watch your back, because there is a bullet with your name on it. As for the rest of the people responsible, their days are numbered too. Fuck you.” —Jan. 31, 2011

•••

A landowner confronted a BLM employee who was surveying public-land boundaries near his private land, near Elk City, Idaho. He said, “Fucking BLM. If I see you on my property I will kick your ass.”Later he said that the BLM surveyors were “sneaking around like snakes,” and if anyone tried to arrest him for making threats, he would resist. The BLM found that one of his buildings was on public land. —July 28, 2010

•••

A man with “a history of disliking the Forest Service and its employees, as well as illegally outfitting and guiding” in Stanislaus National Forest, insulted and tried to trip a Forest Service employee during a public meeting in Greeley Hill, California. The employee — “wearing a full law enforcement uniform” — was crossing the room to show people a map on the wall. The suspect, who was part of a group of men, “began to snicker” as the employee walked by, then “abruptly” moved his leg and bumped the employee’s knee in “an obvious attempt” to trip him.

The Forest Service employee sidestepped the move, then heard “lots of snickering and saw most of the men in the group looking at (him) in a despising manner.” The employee spent the rest of the meeting standing against the wall in a defensive posture. Later, the employee learned that the man had “commented that if anyone from the USFS tried to stop him while he was on his OHV (off-highway vehicle), he would not stop.” —Jan. 6, 2010

•••

Paul Lachine

A large angry man threatened a female Forest Service employee at the Little Rock Dam Recreation Area in Angeles National Forest in Southern California. The confrontation began when she told a party of rafters that they were floating in an area that was off-limits due to the risk of spreading invasive quagga mussels. Some of them pulled their rafts to shore, but others jumped from one raft into the water and swam away. In response, she collected that raft, but the angry man, who was roughly 6-foot-3 and 245 pounds, later approached her in the parking lot, yelling, “You stupid bitch, who the fuck do you think you are, taking my raft from me, you fucking bitch, how dare you.”

She tried to coax him away from small kids who were in the parking lot. He told her, “You stupid whore, you just think you can do whatever you want ... to make all our recreation go away. ... You’re just one of those environmental bitches who just think that you know it all. ... You are just as stupid as the BLM.”

She remained calm, but when she was stepping over a suspended chain at the edge of the lot, he tried to trip her by rocking the chain with his foot. She attempted to call for backup on her cellphone and handheld radio, but was out of signal range. As he loaded his raft into his van, she tried to write down his license-plate number, but he grabbed for the papers in her hand, scratching her wrist. She managed to write down the information anyway, and then he yelled out the van’s window “stupid cunt bitch” and drove off through a group of bystanders “who had to quickly get out of his driving path.” —Aug. 5, 2012

•••

A “crazed, shirtless” man — “covered in blood” and brandishing a stick — confronted BLM employees who were conducting a mussel survey near Eugene, Oregon. The man also blocked the crew’s route with his Toyota camper. He later told investigators that he was an artist who “survived by eating crayfish and other food he found in the forest.” —Oct. 1, 2012

•••

A man upset about the seasonal closure of a road in Southern California’s Cleveland National Forest phoned the Descanso Ranger District office and threatened the female employee who answered the phone. He told her that he was going to “put a 12-gauge shotgun in someone’s facetil he gets an answer.” —Dec. 5, 2011

•••

A man in Glasgow, Montana, who thought that the BLM was “stealing” from his mining claims, threatened to “kill every one of them BLM employees if given the chance.” An investigation determined that the man was “diagnosed psychotic” and had a history of assaulting people. —Nov. 14, 2013

•••

A man walked into the Happy Camp Ranger District office of Klamath National Forest in Northern California and said he “was going to blow up the office. He made further statements that he would never really do it but told them that is what he feels like doing. (He) was angry with the Forest Service for multiple reasons including the closure of several campgrounds. ... (He) also made statements that he just wanted to kill somebody but again recanted the statement saying that he would never really do it.” —March 13, 2012

•••

An angry man repeatedly phoned a woman working in an office of Idaho Republican Congressman Raúl Labrador and threatened BLM rangers. He thought that rangers surveying public-land boundaries near his mining claim near Riggins, Idaho, “wanted to take his land,” and vowed to take the local BLM manager “behind the woodshed, teach him some manners and do him in.” The woman thought the man was “ramping up ... escalating toward violence,” and “was very concerned about the safety of the survey crew.” She said that “someone with a gun needs to get to the survey crew immediately to protect them.” —May 4-10, 2011

•••

Two female Forest Service employees were checking vehicles entering Lytle Creek Canyon in California’s San Bernardino National Forest for the required “Adventure Pass,” which costs $5 per day or $30 per year. When they started to place a citation on a parked truck that didn’t display a pass, its driver stormed out of the creek area, yelling over and over, “You better not write me a ticket! I’ll kick your fucking ass!” Then he ripped the paper off his windshield and threw it on the ground, yelling, “I told you not to write me a ticket! I’m not paying this shit!”

The man, who was “very angry and was throwing his arms wildly into the air ... continued his swearing/ranting.” They replaced the citation on his windshield, and again he threw it away. Then the man’s father and an unidentified woman appeared and gave the man the keys to the truck. The man climbed into the cab and appeared to be searching for something, claiming he had an annual pass. The employees, however, feared he was looking for a gun. Hoping to defuse the confrontation and call for backup, they began driving away, but as they did so, the man’s father ran up and slapped the side of their truck. —Jan. 31, 2010

•••

A Forest Service employee in California went to a man’s home near Sequoia National Forest to question him about illegal woodcutting. The man “was very uncooperative and irate,” so the employee “left the area to avoid further confrontation.” The next day, the man walked into the forest’s Kernville office, saying that “he had a right to shoot (the Forest Service employee) if he came back to his property.” —Nov. 12, 2013

•••

A man who had been driving off-road in a prohibited area of Sonoran Desert National Monument in Arizona scuffled with three BLM employees who wanted to cite him for the violation. The man locked himself in his pickup, said he could do “whatever the fuck he wanted,” yelled “profanities” and spat in the face of one of the BLM employees. As they tried to pull him out of the pickup, one of them broke a side window to get better access, and it turned into a wrestling match. As they dropped him to the ground and handcuffed him, he was “screaming and resisting the entire time.” —Nov. 10, 2012

•••

The driver of a turbo-charged “large black Ford pickup” on a four-lane Oregon highway near Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest harassed a uniformed Forest Service employee in a marked patrol vehicle. The pickup driver was going 60 mph, but when the Forest Service vehicle approached, the pickup driver slowed to less than 55 and “stayed in the fast lane, failing to yield.” The Forest Service employee, driving between 60 and 65, passed the pickup on the right, but the pickup driver revved his engine and sped up, trying to cut off the employee.

The employee did manage to get past the black pickup, but its driver “continued to accelerate up to the rear” of the employee’s vehicle and “continued to follow at a dangerously close distance” as the road narrowed to two lanes and entered a town, until the employee turned off the highway. —April 14, 2011

•••

Someone made repeated anonymous threatening phone calls to the home of a Colville National Forest employee in eastern Washington. “On several of the phone calls, (the employee) could clearly hear what he believes to be gun shots in the background.” The employee believes that the threats were a “direct result” of his forest work. —Oct. 6, 2011

•••

A BLM employee patrolling a “dance rave” in the desert near Black Rock City, Nevada, observed two men urinating on a “fully marked patrol vehicle.” The employee chased and scuffled with one of the men, deploying his taser. The crowd intervened, pinned the employee to the ground and hit him multiple times in the back. He escaped with the help of an onlooker in a white cowboy hat, and then, “due to the adrenalin dump,” he “began to vomit.” —Sept. 3, 2011

•••

A man driving a van made a threatening gesture at a Forest Service employee in traffic in Colville, Washington. The employee, who had just left a meeting in the Colville National Forest supervisor’s office, was in uniform and driving a Forest Service law-enforcement vehicle. As he passed the van, the man raised “both hands above the steering wheel and cusped them together as if pointing an imaginary pistol.” The man’s “hands twitched up three times as if (he) was simulating the recoil of a fired weapon” with his “lips pursed ... making shooting sounds” — aimed at the Forest Service employee.

The man then pulled into traffic and tailed the Forest Service employee. He passed “aggressively” on the right and acted as if he was going to steer back to the left to cut off the employee’s vehicle. The employee said later that it was clearly “an attempt to intimidate me.” —Jan. 14, 2011

•••

An oilfield worker described as a “pumper” threatened a BLM employee near Buffalo, Wyoming. The employee, who was monitoring the Fence Creek Oil Field, noticed “a flow line running on the ground.” When he asked the pumper about the problem, “a heated conversation took place,” and the pumper said, “Don’t get on me or you won’t like the outcome.” When the employee returned a week later, he found “a hanging rope that was tied to be a noose.”—Sept. 28, 2011

•••

A man made anonymous phone calls to the headquarters of Gallatin National Forest in Montana, saying that after roaming “the countryside,” he’d concluded that the Forest Service should be “spanked severely, and I’m not kidding when I say that.” In a second call, he said: “I have lived in the Tobacco Roots forever. You are killing them. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.” —July 20, 2012

This coverage is supported by contributors to the High Country News Enterprise Journalism Fund. Map created by Brian Calvert and Marshall Swearingen.

Ray Ring is an HCN senior editor based in Bozeman, Montana. Marshall Swearingen is a former HCN intern, now serving as HCN’s FOIA project manager and freelancing; he’s also based in Bozeman.

]]>No publisherPublic LandsBureau of Land ManagementNational Park ServiceU.S. Forest ServicePoliticsDefuse the West2014/10/27 04:00:00 GMT-6ArticleUtilities experiment on the rural Northwesthttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.17/utilities-experiment-on-the-rural-northwest
Real-time response to demand could radically shift how the grid operates. The northwestern Wyoming town of Bondurant, population 100, is little more than horse pastures punctuated by a handful of rustic homes, along with a lone restaurant, the Branding Iron Cafe, and, next door, the tiny post office. Postmistress Amy Joe Stern tries to keep the power bill down at this small rural facility. So she jumped at a chance to get a $15-per-month credit from Lower Valley Energy, the utility cooperative that serves roughly 26,000 homes and businesses in the area.

Lower Valley pays the Bondurant Post Office and some 500 other volunteer customers for allowing the utility to connect small gray boxes to their electric water heaters. Whenever electricity demand is highest across Lower Valley’s grid — usually in the morning, when office lights and work machinery flip on while home water heaters are still cranking after morning showers — the utility sends a signal over the power lines to the boxes, telling the water heaters, which are major power gulpers, to turn off until energy use drops.

It’s called demand response, and it represents a radical shift in the operation of the power grid. Traditionally, grid operators react to fluctuations in demand, or load, by throttling power plants and hydroelectric dams, ensuring that the amount of electricity they’re producing equals the amount their customers are using at any moment. With demand response, they can also react by adjusting the load, curbing customers’ energy use instead of, say, revving up a natural gas plant.

Most of today’s grid, however, is antiquated and “dumb.” Grid operators aren’t able to monitor what’s going on with it remotely and they often find out about outages only when they get irate phone calls. And the system’s not equipped to allow the type of interactive exchange mentioned above. Bondurant’s gray boxes are a small step toward making the grid “smart,” a broad term describing a grid equipped with two-way communication and computer monitoring capabilities. As these technologies are implemented, it could revolutionize the grid in the same way that smartphones have replaced landlines. Lower Valley, together with 10 other utilities in the region, is part of an experiment called the Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project to see what that looks like.

Source: Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project

“It means having dramatically better real-time information about what’s happening on the grid,” says Lower Valley engineer Warren Jones. “In the future, a freezer, washing machine, or whatever, will look for times when wind power is being generated … and that’s when those appliances will operate. It sounds a little pie-in-the-sky, but I don’t think we’re far from there, really.”

Perhaps nowhere is the case for smart grid stronger than in the Pacific Northwest. For decades, the Bonneville Power Administration, the federal agency created to market the electricity produced by numerous large dams on the Columbia River, has bathed the region in cheap electrons, exporting the power to as far away as Montana, Wyoming and even Los Angeles. The system, including the transmission lines, substations, meters and monthly bills, was tuned to the steady hum of the dams. But growing demand for energy has bottlenecked transmission lines and pushed new energy generation, especially wind power, onto Bonneville’s grid.

As recently as the mid-2000s, Bonne­ville had virtually no wind power in its portfolio. Spurred on by federal tax credits, the industry has since boomed, and now Bonneville’s energy mix is more wind-heavy than any large utility in the country. “It’s a big deal,” says Lee Hall, then-Bonneville’s smart-grid and demand-response manager. Clustered around the Columbia River, where the wind often blows wildly at night but dies during the day, the turbines tend to produce power exactly when Bonneville doesn’t need it. Many times, the utility has had to shut them down entirely, unable to harness bursts of wind when there’s not enough demand for both hydroelectric and wind power.

Bonneville, of course, wants to use all of that wind energy, “and the best way to do that is to use computer-based, automated responses” that can help shift consumer demand to those times when the wind turbines are producing the most power, Hall says.

When the Department of Energy in 2009 pledged $620 million for experimental smart grid projects, Bonneville invited utilities across the region to partner with it. Since 2010, the utilities have tapped their $89 million share of the funds to install more than 69,000 “smart meters” that send real-time energy usage information to the utility, replacing the old meters read monthly by roving utility employees. The new meters also allow the utilities to communicate with devices such as Bondurant’s gray boxes. Other devices, installed on transmission poles, automatically sense power outages on the grid and re-route the flow of electricity.

A Portland General Electric 5-megawatt, lithium-ion energy storage system, which will allow about 500 customers to tap into a power reserve during electricity disruptions.

Courtesy PGE

Bonneville also directed Battelle, the contractor that manages the project from the Energy Department’s Pacific Northwest National Lab, to simulate how an interactive, regional smart grid might work. Battelle calculates hypothetical prices of power based on factors like wind availability and broadcasts the signals to the utilities, which respond in a variety of ways. Portland General Electric, which tapped project funds to build a 5 MW battery bank (enough to supply about 500 homes for about 20 minutes), discharges the batteries when the signal says power is expensive and charges them when power is cheap.

For now, the effect of these experiments on the region’s energy use is minimal. Lower Valley and the other small utilities taking part in the project have only installed about 1,600 water heater controls, for instance. But already, the utilities are finding reasons to embrace some of the changes.

Flathead Electric Cooperative, which serves 48,000 members in northwestern Montana, signed up some 100 volunteers to try out dishwashers, washing machines and dryers that respond to the Pacific Northwest Lab’s price signal. An alert on a computer display in the volunteers’ homes tells them when peak power demand, and thus peak power price, hits. Appliances are programmed to respond. The dryer’s heating element will turn off while the clothes continue to tumble, for example, or the dishwasher’s heat cycle will pause until peak power passes. (The volunteer has the option of overriding these responses.) These little adjustments can reduce household energy use by more than 10 percent during those periods.

That difference adds up for Flathead Electric. Because much of the area lacks natural gas lines, residents tend to heat homes and water using electricity, which slams the grid on cold mornings. Bonne­ville, which supplies nearly all of Flathead Electric’s electricity, typically must respond to those surges in demand by throttling the turbines on its dams. To discourage those surges, Bonneville recently quadrupled the price it charges Flathead Electric when that utility’s power use spikes above a specified amount.

At a series of public meetings in rural Libby, Montana, Teri Rayome-Kelly, Flathead Electric’s demand-response coordinator, explained the new costs coming from Bonneville, and how the co-op was trying to flatten out peak load. The small, struggling town, once famous for asbestos mining, is the type of place one might expect resistance to smart meters and the like, with critics charging that they invade privacy or rob Americans of the freedom to run appliances whenever we want. But Rayome-Kelly didn’t have any problems getting volunteers. After all, what they’re really gaining is more control ­— over their power bill.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryOregonNorthwestWashington2014/10/20 02:10:00 GMT-6ArticleWatershed momenthttp://www.hcn.org/articles/watershed-moment
The U.S. and Canada prepare to renegotiate the 50-year-old Columbia River Treaty.For 16 consecutive days in August, tribal members, environmental activists and others gathered along the banks of the Columbia River, each day a different group at a different location, working upstream from the river's mouth at the Oregon-Washington border to its headwaters in British Columbia, Canada. The progression followed the route of the 1,200-mile-long river’s once-prolific and now decimated salmon runs, on what has become one of the world’s most industrialized waterways.

The demonstrators aimed to draw attention to the river’s plight and to a seemingly minor but actually monumental legal fact: Sept. 16 marked the first time the U.S. or Canada could terminate, with a 10-year notice, the 1964 Columbia River Treaty — the bedrock law that coordinates operation of 14 dams on the river, plus many more on its tributaries. That possibility has triggered a flurry of action as both countries position to renegotiate the treaty, proposing changes that could dramatically re-shape the river's future.

Paul Lumley, a citizen of the Yakama Nation and director of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, a tribal agency representing four tribes in river-management issues, is one of many who see a new treaty as a tool for reversing decades of environmental abuse. "It's probably the best opportunity in our lifetimes to affect how the Columbia River is managed," he says, especially when it comes to salmon.

The treaty originated in the aftermath of major flooding in 1948, when heavy rain on a thick winter snowpack churned the Columbia into a monster that wiped out Vanport, Oregon, leaving 18,000 homeless. In response, the U.S. and Canada stepped up efforts to tame the transboundary river. The treaty authorized construction of three major dams in British Columbia — which the U.S. helped pay for — as well as the Libby Dam in Montana on the Kootenai River, a major tributary. The agreement also established a framework for sharing the flood-control and hydropower benefits from those dams and others.

And by those measures, the treaty has succeeded: The Columbia Basin dams, operated in careful coordination by the two countries, have prevented flooding and given the region reliable and cheap electricity. But 15 Columbia Basin tribes have another view, stating with rare consensus in 2010 that the treaty has "degraded rivers … natural resources, and tribal customs and identities." Dozens of the Columbia's salmon and steelhead stocks have gone extinct, and 13 remain listed as threatened or endangered. Much of that collapse occurred before the treaty, the result of over-fishing and the construction of dams like Grand Coulee and Chief Joseph, which lack fish ladders and block salmon from reaching the Upper Columbia Basin. But the treaty added additional dams without fish passage, and the 1960s negotiations, adding insult to injury, completely excluded the tribes.

So in 2010, the tribes demanded to be included in any treaty talks brought on by the 2014 trigger. The Army Corps of Engineers and the region's federal electric distributor, the Bonneville Power Administration — which together represent the U.S. in the treaty — received input from the tribes, as well as from states and federal agencies, and crafted a proposal for treaty changes. Last year, they submitted the proposal to the U.S. State Department, which is responsible for advising the president on treaty matters.

The proposal’s most striking feature — largely bearing the fingerprint of the tribes — is "ecosystem function" as a third major treaty tenet alongside flood control and hydropower. That could provide legal justification for changing dam operations, including timing reservoir releases to enhance fish health and creating an adaptive plan to deal with climate change. "The leadership by the tribes has really been extraordinary," says Rachael Osborn, director of the Washington-based Center for Environmental Law and Policy, which helped to organize the August riverside gatherings. "They have put a vision out there."

The focus of that vision involves restoring salmon to their native Canadian spawning grounds. For decades, that has seemed a daunting, even insurmountable task. Now, a growing coalition of tribes, religious leaders and conservation groups see "ecosystem function" as the needed lever. In a declaration sent Sept. 23 to President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, many religious leaders — including the Catholic archdioceses of Portland and Seattle — plus representatives of nearly all the Columbia Basin tribes and First Nations, called for modernizing the treaty to restore salmon and other fish "to all historical locations throughout the Columbia River basin."

The actual proposal, however, is more cautious. It would only direct the U.S. and Canada to "investigate" and possibly implement an incremental plan for restoring salmon to the upper basin. That's earned support from over 80 of the region's utilities, which chafe at the prospect of increasing the cost of hydropower. (The region's utility ratepayers, along with American taxpayers, already spend nearly $1 billion annually on fish recovery.) But that compromise hints at cracks between the stakeholders that could widen into bigger rifts.

Salmon have not been able to pass into the upper half of the Columbia River basin since Grand Coulee Dam, above, was constructed in the 1930's. Restoring salmon to the upper basin is just one of the &quot;ecosystem functions&quot; tribes have requested be included in proposed Treaty changes. David M. Walsh / United States Bureau of Reclamation (USBR).

The utilities' money concerns could indeed prove a major sticking point, potentially overshadowing the enthusiasm for "ecosystem function." In addition to funding salmon recovery, U.S. utilities give British Columbia nearly $300 million in hydropower each year in return for reliable flows from the Canadian dams. The U.S. utilities think this so-called "Canadian Entitlement" is worth significantly less, while British Columbia, which holds treaty authority on the Canadian side, wants to preserve or increase the amount.

And British Columbia has considerable weight behind it: Under the existing treaty, the province's obligation to provide guaranteed flood control to the U.S. expires in 2024. If that were to happen, the U.S. would have to steeply draw down its reservoirs ahead of spring runoff, further stressing salmon as well as hydropower, irrigation and other river uses. Climate change would increase stress with earlier runoff and drier summers, potentially throwing river management into disarray.

British Columbia has indicated its willingness to extend the flood control agreement. But despite First Nations and other Canadian locals’ demand for something like "ecosystem function," the province opposes sweeping changes, such as leveraging the treaty for upper-basin fish passage. That's led to a general sense among stakeholders that the U.S. — which is calling for sweeping changes — will be the one to open talks.

Hence the fragile consensus in the U.S. among the tribes, utilities, federal agencies, state governments and others who support the 2013 proposal — a display of broad support intended to prod the Obama administration into action. All 26 congressional delegates from the Northwest states have urged the State Department to act on the proposal no later than 2015, calling the treaty "an issue of paramount importance for the entire Pacific Northwest." The State Department, considering its options behind closed doors, has given no indication of when it might open treaty talks.

If, and almost certainly, when, those talks occur, it will become apparent how durable the U.S. consensus is — and whether a new Columbia River Treaty can truly reshape the mighty river's future. Until then, "we have to support each other," says Lumley, referring to the diverse set of stakeholders behind the proposal. "If we don't, then the whole thing could unravel."

Marshall Swearingen is a contributor to High Country News. He writes from Bozeman, Montana.

]]>No publisherWaterNorthwestCanadaTribesRivers & LakesFish2014/10/06 05:10:00 GMT-6ArticleCosmic Prospecting in Lead, South Dakotahttp://www.hcn.org/issues/45.19/cosmic-prospecting-in-lead-south-dakota
What happens when an old mining town recruits a physics lab and pursues Big Science?On a hill above this town of 3,100 people, tucked in the pines of the Black Hills, headframes still stand like sentinels. Their corrugated-steel faces bear the fading emblem of the Homestake Mining Company, the former core of Lead – pronounced "leed," a mining term for the gold veins that lured prospectors in the 1870s. During Lead's gold-mining heyday, which lasted into the 1990s, the headframes lowered 700 miners a day in crowded cages to tunnels deep underground, where they drilled and blasted for the raw material of Lead's prosperity.

But on July 13, 2013, the scene at the Yates Shaft headframe is vastly different. In the parking lot, amid former Homestake offices and machine shops, people of all ages are gathered for a kind of science fair. Some peer through telescopes at solar flares, while others watch demonstrations of solar panels and water filtration systems.

They're also eager to get a glimpse of the old mine. Donning hardhats, dozens file into the hoist room, where giant spools of wrist-thick cable still raise and lower the cages. These days, however, the cages are packed with scientists, who go deep underground in search of discoveries on the frontiers of physics.

This mine is now the Sanford Underground Research Facility, owned and operated by the state government, with the U.S. Department of Energy providing funding and management support. And July 13 is Neutrino Day, Lead's annual festival, named for the tiny, elusive particles that are considered so important, scientists studying them have won three Nobel prizes. Because neutrinos can best be studied deep underground, this old mining town has made the unlikely decision to transform itself with Big Science – the stuff of high-tech centralized labs and federal budgets.

Neutrino Day also enlivens downtown Lead. A school bus shuttles tourists to the 99-year-old Historic Homestake Opera House, where Rick Gaitskell, a physicist from Rhode Island's Ivy League Brown University, is on stage. He speaks in a polished British accent about his search for "dark matter," one of the great unclaimed prizes in the field of particle astrophysics, and something that also might be studied effectively in the mine's depths. Down the block, a restaurant advertises $8.99 Double Dark Matter Cheeseburgers. And in the Lead Deadwood Arts Center gallery, 22 South Dakota artists display their own interpretations of dark matter in mind-bending sculptures and paintings. One, titled A New Millennium of Knowledge – In Search of Dark Matter, depicts a Homestake headframe beside a unicorn and an atom buzzing with electrons.

By the time Neutrino Day 2013 winds down, an impressive 1,100-some scientific tourists have participated, the biggest turnout since the Chamber of Commerce launched the festival in 2001. Back then, when Lead was courting the lab to compensate for the mine's closure that year, Neutrino Day was less a tourist event than a determined show of support from local businesses and boosters. Even though the shift to Big Science hasn't made the town rich yet, many people echo the Chamber's website, which declares: "Lead's future lies in the Sanford Laboratory."

"It's a big deal for our little town, which has struggled and struggled over the years," says Karen Everett, a former Homestake employee who's now the director of the Lead Deadwood Arts Center, "to all of a sudden be on the world map for physics."

In coming years, the discoveries made here could fundamentally re-order our understanding of the universe, answering questions such as: Why does matter exist at all? But as the next generation of underground experiments takes shape, the lab is also revealing the messy, political underside of Big Science. And this intellectual industry is already reshaping this rural community in surprising ways. If this is the ultimate case of the Old West meeting the New, the two are so far proving surprisingly compatible.

From 1877 until2001, Lead was a company town, ticking to the shifts at the Homestake Mine. Even the brick and mortar of the town moved with the mine, the streets and buildings buckling from the collapse of tunnels chiseled by Italians and Swedes with eight-pound sledges. The mine's open pit encroached on downtown, and eventually 370 miles of tunnels were dug. Homestake paychecks built homes and shops, while the company itself built the opera house, recreation center and library.

Homestake was one of the richest mines in the country, yielding 1,400 tons of gold and enabling the company to extend its operations internationally in the 1960s. It became the deepest mine in the Western Hemisphere. But at 8,000 feet below the surface –– so far down the rock was hot to the touch –– the cost to extract the low-grade ore increased, while gold prices declined. So in a move typical for any commodity-based, boom-and-bust business, Homestake cut its Lead operations by more than half in 1998, and in 2000 announced plans to close the mine by the end of the next year. It was already clear, however, that the mine had other uses – especially for cutting-edge physics research.

Neutrinos are often called "the ghosts of the universe" because they're invisible, electrically neutral and millions of times smaller than electrons. Scientists first postulated their existence in the 1930s, and believe that they're generated by nuclear fusion in stars and possibly by supernovas and other violent cosmic events, as well as by nuclear reactors and nuclear bombs. It's thought that some are even relics of the original Big Bang that created the universe. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frederick Reines called them "the most tiny quantity of reality ever imagined by a human being." They "can travel at nearly the speed of light ... without being deflected by magnetic fields or absorbed by matter," conveying "astronomical information from the edge of the universe and from deep inside the most cataclysmic high-energy processes," according to a consortium of universities in 11 countries. Our sun alone generates so many neutrinos that tens of billions of them pass through a person's fingernail every second.

"Even though neutrinos are some of the most abundant particles in the universe, they are essentially the least understood," says John Wilkerson, a University of North Carolina physics professor and principal investigator for a current neutrino experiment in the Sanford Lab. But understanding them, he says, may enable scientists to answer fundamental questions about the fabric of the cosmos, including why more matter exists than anti-matter (particles that combine with and annihilate matter). In other words, he says, the study of neutrinos may help us answer the most basic question of all: "Why are we here?"

On the Earth's surface, the subtle natural drizzle of neutrinos is obscured by a barrage of cosmic rays – bits of atomic shrapnel hurled by exploding stars and black holes. But thick layers of rock block cosmic rays – a capability that has made the Homestake Mine valuable for research since the 1960s, when a team led by U.S. Atomic Energy Commission physicist Ray Davis sought to detect neutrinos in a cavern on the 4,850-foot level, which miners had excavated for the experiment. The team installed a detector – basically a 100,000-gallon tank of dry-cleaning fluid – and, by 1968, registered the occasional faint collision between neutrino and atom, also eventually winning a Nobel Prize. The famous "Homestake experiment," which was the first to observe the sun's neutrinos, inspired other experiments in underground labs around the world.

More recently, physicists also began going underground to study dark matter particles, which have proven even more elusive. Since the 1930s, astronomers have predicted the existence of an unaccounted-for mass that comprises more than 25 percent of the universe, binding together galaxies and other celestial bodies. Like neutrinos, dark matter particles may pass invisibly through the Earth as we pinwheel around our galaxy at hundreds of miles per second.

"Dark matter may have had profound effects on the evolution of the galaxy and the universe," says Jaret Heise, a Canadian with a graying ponytail who speaks about the cosmos as casually as one might speak about the weather. He used to conduct neutrino experiments in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, 6,800 feet down in a nickel mine in Ontario, Canada, and now serves as the Sanford Lab's science director. "It's likely that it was the kernel around which our galaxy formed."

As questions about neutrinos and dark matter became central to advancing the physics frontiers, access to underground labs grew more crucial. The U.S. had only a few relatively shallow sites that were fully dedicated to research, including an abandoned iron mine in Minnesota, so U.S. researchers often had to rely on well-funded underground labs burrowed into Italian and Russian mountains or tucked into a Japanese mine. A National Research Council report, begun in 2000 and published in 2003, joined many other expert voices calling for the development of a convenient deep underground lab in the U.S.

"We are at a special moment in our journey to understand the universe and the physical laws that govern it," the National Research Council said, acknowledging that "these questions strain the limits of human ingenuity." Yet no one foresaw the challenges involved in trying to transform the Homestake Mine into the world's premier underground lab.

By the time the last load of ore was hoisted up the Homestake Mine's shafts in December 2001, Democratic South Dakota Sen. Tim Johnson had secured $10 million, part of an appropriations bill signed by Republican President George W. Bush, to help build a national lab here. Scientists rallied around a National Science Foundation proposal to turn the mine into their dream, the National Underground Science Laboratory, a $200 million complex where biologists and geologists could probe the tunnels for deep-earth organisms and core samples, and physicists could conduct large experiments in refinished rooms carved from the rock to depths of 7,400 feet.

Two key scientists hailed the mine's research potential in the Rapid City Journal, predicting it would lead to "the development of new materials important to industry, the design and testing of various detectors crucial to national security and defense, and novel opportunities for future advances in earth science, microbiology, electronics, computer engineering, etc."

There were plenty of reasons for locals to support the proposal. For one thing, it meant pumps would continue to keep underground water from filling the tunnels, staving off the spread of acidic, toxic runoff – one of the problems common to closed-down heavy metals mines. It also carried a whiff of excitement, recalling the time "Champion Wire-walker" Ivy Baldwin tight-roped 800 feet across the Homestake open pit in 1916. And, most of all, it would extend the Homestake Mine's long run.

"This mine had been going so long, you had fourth-generation mining families," says Jim Hanhardt, who started work at Homestake in 1988 as a miner and a shaftman. "To a lot of people, this was the only employment they knew. Everybody hoped (the lab) would happen soon enough, they wouldn't have to move away to different jobs."

Lab boosters stoked those hopes. South Dakota School of Mines and Technology President Richard Gowen, whom Gov. Mike Rounds would later appoint as head of the Homestake Laboratory Conversion Project, told miners, "You know the rock, you know the mine and you're the people we want," according to the Black Hills Pioneer. The Journal described a hand-written sign left on a pile of blasting caps on the 7400 Level during the last mining shift: "Save for the NSF."

The mine-to-lab conversion, however, hit an obstacle immediately. The same month the last ore was extracted, Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corporation bought out Homestake, aiming to tap the company's 125 years of experience on its way to becoming a global giant. Barrick agreed in principle to donate the Homestake Mine to science, but feared lawsuits over injuries and environmental problems. When Democratic South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle championed a bill to shield the company from liability, he drew fire not just from environmentalists – who thought it would set a bad precedent for mine reclamation – but also from political rivals. Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh – always seeking an angle against liberals, even if it meant a momentary alliance with environmentalists – blasted Daschle for giving Barrick "a free pass on polluting the environment with toxic waste."

The partisan sparring and unresolved liability stalled negotiations at the national level, even as Lead and neighboring cities and counties passed resolutions supporting the lab. Barrick continued to resist the complicated mine-transfer deal, despite a pleading letter from 14 Nobel Prize-winning scientists and legendary physicist Stephen Hawking, and in June 2003, the company shut down the pumps. Some physicists began proposing other lab sites.

With the lab proposal here unraveling, the mine's closure "had a tremendous impact on the town," says Hanhardt, who worked on the final crews shuttering the mine until 2003. "The prices on housing dropped, people had to move away. ... It just caused a lot of turmoil."

Then, in 2004, Gov. Rounds, citing the billions of dollars of economic development the lab might bring to the Black Hills, pushed the state Legislature to resolve the liability concerns by creating the South Dakota Science and Technology Authority. The new agency would resemble entities created by other states to cash in on science research, but its main purpose was to assume full ownership of the defunct mine and take Barrick off the hook. In 2006, the company gave the state the mine property, including 186 surface acres.

But the delay allowed other Western communities to enter the competition for a new underground lab. The proposals ranged from expanding the Department of Energy's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico to using railroad tunnels under the Cascade Mountains near Seattle. In 2005, the National Science Foundation narrowed the proposals to Homestake and the Henderson molybdenum mine in Empire, Colo., largely because both sites, by virtue of being mines, were already excavated and had much of the necessary infrastructure, such as hoists. Empire, like Lead, saw a chance to dodge a mining bust.

It wasn't the first time that Westerners had competed for Big Science. In the late 1980s, most Western states vied for the Superconducting Super Collider, a 53-mile circumference, $4.4 billion project that would have been the world's largest atom-smasher, another important tactic in particle physics. "We can smell the supercollider. ... It smells like greenbacks," Utah Lt. Gov. Val Oveson told the Denver Post. In South Dakota, the Legislature approved $63 million in incentives and offered to condemn and purchase land for the Super Collider. The feds eventually chose Dallas, Texas, and pumped more than $2 billion into construction there, before Congress, concerned about ballooning costs, cancelled it in 1993.

Courting a physics lab for the Homestake Mine – an even larger incarnation of the original proposal, retitled the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory – South Dakota pledged $34 million for the nuts-and-bolts work of retrofitting the mine. Another $70 million came from T. Denny Sanford, a South Dakotan who made the Forbes billionaire list by issuing credit cards with high fees and up to 79.9 percent interest rates to people with bad credit scores through the bank he owns, First Premier. (Sanford had already plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into children's hospitals at the advice of friend Newt Gingrich.) But the bulk of the lab's funding depended on the National Science Foundation's approval.

Another round of suspense ended in 2007: A National Science Foundation committee unanimously selected Homestake, citing several factors, including the mine's depth and the character of the rock, which formed an effective shield for experiments. The state's Science Authority started rehabilitating the shafts and pumping out the water. Then more obstacles arose. The National Science Foundation had allotted $29 million to help design the lab, but it turned down a request for double that amount to deal with unexpected water and safety concerns.

In 2010, the National Science Foundation decided not to take a managing role, saying the Energy Department was better suited for the job. The decision derailed grand plans for creating a Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory in the Homestake Mine. But one of the oldest and biggest federal labs in the West – the Energy Department's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California-Berkeley, where particle accelerator experiments in the 1930s gave rise to Big Science, and where research ranging from climate change to biology continues today – agreed to manage a scaled-down version. It would start off with a few high-priority physics experiments on the 4850 Level (where Davis' neutrino experiment still stood), while also opening the tunnels to geologists and biologists. And it was renamed after Sanford, as the importance of his donation was magnified by the National Science Foundation's withdrawal.

Local contractors hastened the mine retrofit, stretching miles of wire and ductwork down the shafts, hauling tons of rebar, gravel and concrete on the hoists, and turning the dark, narrow, dirt-floored tunnel on the 4850 Level into the "Davis Campus" – a 30,000-square-foot lab with a machine shop, flush toilets and Wi-Fi. After more than a decade of political wrangling, on May 30, 2012, dozens of scientists in hardhats gathered to celebrate what was in effect the underground lab's opening day.

"Other than thehardhats, you kind of forget you're a mile underground," Jim Hanhardt's son, Mark, tells me via videoconference from the Davis Campus when I visit the lab shortly after Neutrino Day. Along with a couple dozen other scientists and lab workers, he's just taken the 11-minute ride down the dark shaft in the same cage that his dad rode as a Homestake miner. Wearing safety glasses and a stubbly beard, he jokes with boyish enthusiasm as he explains what's going on with the experiments.

Mark Hanhardt calls himself "a jack of all trades, master of physics." During his days underground, he does odd jobs like repairing equipment, and he's also a 32-year-old grad student at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, a technical college with 2,400 students in nearby Rapid City, whose sports teams are named the "Hardrockers." He's involved in the lab's Large Underground Xenon, or LUX, dark-matter experiment, which has caught the interest of physicists around the world.

Particle astrophysics research proceeds the way all science does, from hypothesis to established theory. But it may be the only field in which scientists spend billions of dollars trying to prove the existence of something, like dark matter, that may not exist at all. This kind of Big Science, as many have predicted, could spin off new medical devices or weaponry the way early nuclear research yielded MRIs and warheads. But the scientists in this field are driven less by possible practical applications than by a restless desire to comprehend the cosmos, to find the patterns underlying both its unutterably vast and tiny realms. It's no wonder they have a habit of condensing their world into acronyms that baffle or amuse the uninitiated.

Weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, are the theoretical bits of dark matter that researchers hope to observe with the LUX. This experiment consists mainly of a trashcan-sized titanium canister filled with liquid xenon and suspended in a tank of water that further buffers the outside radiation. Like Davis' "neutrino tank," the LUX acts like a net, registering a distinct signal if struck by a passing WIMP. But on Oct. 30, after an 85-day search for WIMPs, scientists announced that the experiment – despite being more sensitive than any of its predecessors – had yet to observe any WIMPs.

On a typical recent day, scientists in steel-toed boots shuffle back and forth in the Davis Campus corridor. Others slip on hooded Tyvec jumpsuits and facemasks, preparing to enter a cleanroom. Inside, scientists are making the world's purest copper, by dissolving already purified chunks of copper from Finland in acid and re-forming it to prevent contamination from cosmic rays. It's then machined into parts for a neutrino experiment called the Majorana Demonstrator (named after "a brilliant Italian theoretician who had a brief career in the 1920s and '30s but vanished mysteriously at the age of 32"). This experiment will measure the radioactive decay of hockey puck-sized germanium crystals placed within a copper detector, shielded against even trace amounts of radiation from the surrounding rock by a castle of 5,000 lead bricks. The goal is to confirm "neutrinoless double-beta decay," a theoretical subatomic process that has never been observed. The results could help explain how matter outweighed anti-matter and created the known universe.

Over time, the Sanford Lab could grow to house more experiments, possibly as many as were envisioned for the grand original lab proposal. One in planning stages, with a nearly $1 billion price tag, is called the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment. It would catch a beam of the particles shot from the Energy Department's Fermilab near Chicago, observing how they morph as they pass through the Earth. Some physicists think it could be the country's flagship experiment, but it's also under budget pressure. The Energy Department's science budget has dwindled since 2010, as it shifts research toward energy conservation and climate change, the Obama administration's priorities. Still, at the Sanford Lab there's an optimism from seeing experiments up and running. "For the next couple decades, at least," says Mark Hanhardt, "we're going to see a lot of Big Science underground."

The work itself is not easy. Wilkerson's Majorana team – a dozen graduate students, post-docs and fellow professors – sometimes works double shifts on the 4850 Level during critical stages of the experiment. Like most of the other researchers, they stay in Lead for only a week or month at a time, rotating through rented houses. Others hail from universities as far away as Canada, Russia and Japan. Lead has everything they need, says Wilkerson, and it's a nice place to get outdoors during their brief free time. "Probably the biggest hardship," he says, "is that people are away from their families."

The scientists' transience and the budget pressures are partly why the lab has had less of an economic impact than locals hoped. Underground research is a specialized and relatively small field, tending to draw scientists who are tethered to their home universities. The biggest underground lab in the world, Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory, draws some 900 scientists but has no more full-time staff than Sanford.

And within the realm of Big Science, Sanford Lab is small. The Pacific Northwest National Lab in Richland, Wash., and the Idaho National Lab in Idaho Falls – both run by the Energy Department – have billion-dollar budgets and thousands of employees, working on dozens of applied-science research projects ranging from bio-energy to nuclear fusion. In recent years, the Energy Department's Los Alamos, N.M., lab has ranked as the state's sixth-largest employer. The Sanford Lab's budget, in rough numbers, is $20 million per year, including $13 million from the Energy Department, $4 million from the Sanford donation, and $2 million from the state.

But in Lead, the lab's $12 million payroll and more than 120 jobs go a long way. "It's the major employer in the community," says Mike Stahl, Lead's city administrator, who used to be a Homestake mining engineer. About 70 lab employees formerly worked for Homestake in one way or another. The lab depends on people with mining experience; they maintain and run the equipment, refurbish the shafts using special chainsaws and black-powder "microblasters," and install new steel supports so that the hoists can handle bigger, future experiments. Other former Homestake employees work at the lab as administrators, security guards and wastewater technicians. Full-timers get health insurance, three weeks' paid vacation and other benefits.

The traveling scientists "buy supplies (and) eat at restaurants," says Stahl. "There are a few art galleries they like to go to." Dena Sheets, a local property manager who rents houses to several of them, says the lab overall "has been a real shot in the arm for this economy." Especially during winter, when the roar of motorcycles headed to the annual national rally in nearby Sturgis has died down and the tourist economy limps along on winter recreation, "you can definitely tell when there is something going on at the lab," says Melissa Johnson, director of Lead's Chamber of Commerce. "It's pretty easy to spot (the scientists): They're not wearing snowmobile gear."

Evidence of the Homestake Mine bust remains visible. The union hall is now a bar, with a used-clothing store in back. Rows of vacant shops line the old downtown; "For Sale" signs dot the neighborhoods. Smaller-scale mining, employing about 150 people, continues a few miles west of town at a cyanide heap-leach operation run by Goldcorp, another Canadian company. But "people are kind of settled into the next stage," says Stahl. "They're past resenting the loss of the mine."

The impact of Big Science on the West has always been more complicated than the basic jobs and dollars. Richland prospers on high-tech business spun off the Pacific Northwest National Lab, but also inherited a legacy of nuclear contamination at the nearby Hanford site, which produced plutonium for weapons from the 1940s to the 1980s. Los Alamos has a nationally recognized high school nurtured by its rural pod of Ph.D.s, but a sense of isolation lingers like a decayed isotope from the secrecy of that town's World War II-era nuclear bomb-building. In Lead, there's a sense that Sanford Lab fills the void that opens like a wound when mining towns go bust. The underground science, which seems harmless compared to nuclear research, has given this small community a new sense of purpose.

"Lead still has a lot of retired Homestake employees and their families," says Stahl. "When the Sanford Lab has presentations, that room is full of those people. They're there because they find it interesting."

Jim Hanhardt recalls his previous life as a "tramp miner," going from town to town as metal prices climbed and fell. After his job with Homestake ended in 2003, he left for stints in California and then Montana. But "I had always had my eye on coming back," he says. "This was home. (My wife and I) raised our kids here."

When I meet him in the lab, near the hallway where the scientists suit up in coveralls for their ride down the shaft, his mining years show. He wears tiny hearing aids after years of operating machinery, and one finger bears a scar from an accident in a Colorado mine. He hands me a photo of a motorcycle he built. "Science is something I've always been interested in," he says.

A job with a contractor doing the shaft rehab in the lab drew him back to Lead in 2008. Two years later, the lab hired him directly, to continue to manage the retrofit and oversee other aspects of the lab operations, using his mining expertise. Like others here, he's hesitant to compare the lab to the mine. "Homestake employed a lot of miners, but (the lab) is a little bit different," he says. "Support of science brings in a bunch of new opportunities that weren't even envisioned back in the Homestake days."

He could be thinking of the local high-school kids doing class projects with the lab, or of recruits from the 4,400 students at Black Hills State University, in nearby Spearfish, who get summer internships here. Or how the state's Science Authority pays for a group of South Dakota high school grads to study physics for a month at the Energy Department's Fermilab and underground labs in Europe. All are part of Science Authority's mission "to foster transformational science education" in addition to running the lab. That mission will soon be anchored in a new $4.5 million education center at the Black Hills University campus, and the Sanford donation will be tapped for more than half of that cost. The center will, among other things, train the region's K-12 science teachers to create "a community culture of appreciation for the pursuit of knowledge," says Ben Sayler, the lab's director of education and outreach.

Jim Hanhardt is probably also proud that his son is one of the state's first physics Ph.D. students in decades. The South Dakota School of Mines' former physics Ph.D. program winked out in the 1950s, and until recently, this state and Vermont were the only states where students couldn't attain that degree. When lab proponents first came to South Dakota to drum up support, "there just weren't many physicists in (the state)," says Tina Keller, director of the physics program at University of South Dakota, where half of the 12 new Ph.D. candidates are enrolled. The lab pushed the state's universities to get involved in the research, and this year the Legislature began to provide funding for the new Ph.D. program, which could grow to more than 40 students. The Ph.D. students are the kind of people you want to keep around, Keller says. "They're creative, they're young, they have a lot of energy."

On Aug. 20, their first day of school, the new Ph.D. students meet in the lab for an orientation. Mark Hanhardt poses with the rest for a photo in front of the old shaft headframe. Some of the students will be on the 4850 Level daily, working on research and taking breaks to attend classes – via videoconference – transmitted from the University of South Dakota, 450 miles away.

"It's not unusual for me to be the only American in a room here," Mark says, down on the 4850 Level. "Being with that mix of cultures, but with everyone driven toward the same goal of ripping open the cover of the universe and taking a peek inside, that's exceptionally rewarding."

Marshall Swearingen, a former HCN intern, is now freelancing from Bozeman, Montana.

Matt Kapust, a South Dakota native who began working at the Sanford Lab as an intern while attending Black Hills State University, provided most of the photographs for this story from work he's done as the lab's multimedia specialist. Additional images were taken by his former photography professor, Steve Babbitt.

This story was funded with reader donations to the High Country News Research Fund.

]]>No publisherGrowth & SustainabilitySouth Dakota2013/11/19 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleCheck those attics: An archivist's plea for your old newspapershttp://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/check-those-attics
Halloween night in the windy railroad town of Livingston, Mont.: a Burlington Northern train, consisting of just three locomotives, hisses from the yard and begins the long, slow climb toward Bozeman. Nobody is onboard but a hobo. The engines crest the pass, pick up speed on the downgrade, hit 80 mph and jump the tracks. Railroad officials arrive on the scene and offer the bruised hobo $100,000 for leads on what happened. They suspect sabotage by disgruntled workers; Burlington Northern had just handed over 900 miles of track to Montana Rail Link, owned by anti-union magnate Dennis Washington.

That was the cover story of the Dec. 7, 1987 issue of High Country News. It's just one of many news articles, essays and maps that you can find in the HCN archives, lined up in bound volumes on the shelves at HCN's Paonia, Colo. headquarters.

It was around this time last year, as cold morning breeze came off mountains yellow with aspen, that I first cracked open the bound volumes. With each turn of the pages – more yellowed and more tattered as I flipped back through the years – I felt my past becoming more whole. It was a wide view of the last 40 years in the West, like the view I get by climbing a certain mountain and looking across the valley where I live.

Part of the reason I couldn't stop flipping through the archives is that they're rare. I didn't know then that the university library here in Bozeman (and a few others in the region) also have bound volumes of HCN issues. But I knew I couldn't find them where I get most of my other information – on the internet.

But that's changing. I recently came across the railroad story, and countless other HCN gems, while digitally scanning every page of every issue that the magazine (then in a newspaper format) published between 1984 and 1994 – the year when issues started being posted routinely to this website. Now, I'm uploading the files to the "Past issues" section of the HCN website. Soon, we hope to have all of HCN history digitized and available there.

This is where you come in. To complete this project, we need many pre-1984 loose issues (which can lie flat on the scanner, unlike bound volumes), listed below. So please, dear old-time reader, do you have dusty piles of HCN issues lurking around the house? If you do, and can bear to part with them at least temporarily, please let me know: marshalls@hcn.org.

As I continue the mostly robotic work of uploading the scanned files, I'll post more archive samplers here on this blog, as well as an updated list of the missing issues. So check back in – and check those attics!

(Dates unknown for those issues listed here without an exact date.)

Missing issues:

25.8 May 3, 1993

15.3 Feb. 2, 1983

15.5 March 18, 1983

15.15 Aug. 5, 1983

15.23 Dec 12, 1983

14.1 Jan. 8, 1982

14.2 Jan. 22, 1982

14.3 Feb. 5, 1982

14.4 Feb. 19, 1982 (Mislabeled Feb. 5 on front cover)

14.5 Mar. 5, 1982

14.6 Mar. 19, 1982

14.22 Nov. 12, 1982

14.25 Dec. 24, 1982

All issues in 1981 - (Nov. 27 issue is mislabeled No. 22)

12.12 June 13, 1980

6.1 1974

6.2 Jan. 18, 1974

6.3 Feb. 1, 1974

6.4

6.5 Mar. 1, 1974

6.7

6.8

6.12 June 7, 1974

5.1 Jan. 5, 1973

5.2 Jan. 19, 1973

5.3 Feb. 2, 1973

5.4 Feb. 16, 1973

5.5 Mar. 2, 1973

5.6 Mar. 16, 1973

5.7 Mar. 30, 1973

5.8 Apr. 13, 1973

5.9 Apr. 27, 1973

5.10 May 11, 1973

5.12 June 8, 1973

5.13 June 22, 1973

5.17 Aug. 31, 1973

5.19 Sept. 28, 1973

5.20

5.22 Nov. 9, 1973

5.23 Nov. 23, 1973

5.24 Dec. 7, 1973

4.1 Jan. 7, 1972

4.3 Feb. 4, 1972

4.5

4.6 Mar. 17, 1972

4.7 Mar. 31, 1972

4.8 Apr. 14, 1972

4.11 May 26, 1972

4.20 Sept. 29, 1972

4.25

4.26 Dec. 22, 1972

All issues in 1971

2.1 1970

2.2

2.7

2.8

2.11

2.12

2.13

2.14

2.19

2.25

2.28

2.33

2.34

1.32 1969

Marshall Swearingen is a former High Country News intern. He writes and archives from Bozeman, Montana.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesBlog Post2013/09/29 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleAlaska tribes attempt to block the controversial Pebble Minehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/45.12/alaska-tribes-attempt-to-block-the-controversial-pebble-mine
Some of the last surviving salmon-based cultures turn to the EPA to protect their communities.Every summer, nearly half the world's spawning sockeye salmon converge on southwest Alaska's Bristol Bay and forge their way inland up great rivers, their silver bodies turning red and hump-backed. Local Native communities -- some of the last surviving salmon-based cultures -- haul in nets heavy with the fish, an activity, says Curyung Tribal Administrator Dorothy B. Larson, that's "engrained in our DNA."

From the 1970s until 2005, Alaska managed most of the Bristol Bay watershed as key habitat for salmon. Then, likely under industry pressure, it rolled back those protections. In 2007, a consortium of Canadian and British mining companies called the Pebble Partnership formed, with plans to mine copper in the headwaters of the Kvichak and Nushagak rivers. Members of local tribes, fearing water pollution from the Pebble Mine -- which could become one of North America's largest -- asked the Environmental Protection Agency to intervene in 2010. "In some areas, we probably could work mining and fish together," says Larson. "But not at the headwaters of two of the largest-producing salmon rivers in the world." Fishermen and big green groups such as the Natural Resource Defense Council joined the fight. And in April, the EPA released a second draft of a study expressing serious concerns about mining's impact on salmon, raising hopes that the agency might invoke its controversial, seldom-used veto power to halt the project in its tracks.

Under Section 404(c) of the Clean Water Act, the EPA has the power to override infrastructure projects approved by the often pro-development Army Corps of Engineers when fish, wildlife, drinking water or recreation are threatened. It does this by vetoing the permits for "dredged or fill material" required to excavate mines and construct tailings dams. Environmental groups have often asked the EPA to use 404(c), but it has done so only 13 times, mostly in the Eastern and Southern U.S.

None of those projects posed anywhere near the threat that the Pebble Mine does, says Craig Johnston, a professor at Oregon's Lewis and Clark Law School. (He worked for the EPA in 1986 on the veto of a Massachusetts shopping mall, which would have destroyed what the agency itself called an "ordinary swamp.") And with Pebble Mine's metals valued at more than $48 billion, the project also dwarfs others in terms of potential profits.

EPA's April report found that a hypothetical Pebble Mine could consume several miles of spawning streams and contaminate the watershed with acid mine drainage and copper, which is toxic to salmonids. Leaks in the slurry pipeline transporting the copper to an ocean port would release high concentrations of toxic metals. And a failure of the tailings dams would devastate salmon habitat for decades. To protect salmon and streams, the draft states, mining wastes "would require management for centuries or even perpetuity."

Pebble, which intends to monitor the mine site "for a minimum of 30 years" after mining ceases, according to its website, is critical of the EPA for overlooking potential mitigation measures like constructing new salmon habitat, and for speculating on its plans before it even files for permits (which it may do this year), a concern shared by Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell, the state's Department of Natural Resources and some local Native communities supportive of the mine for the jobs and tax revenue it would bring.

The EPA has vetoed high-profile projects in the past: In 1990, for example, then-Administrator William Reilly angered Colorado's congressmen by nixing Denver Water's plans to construct Two Forks Reservoir, which would have destroyed a prime trout stream. And in 2011, then-EPA head Lisa Jackson revoked a permit for a mountain-top-removal coal mine in West Virginia. The mining company appealed, but in April, the Supreme Court upheld the EPA's authority to use 404(c) "whenever" it wants. The Wall Street Journal, echoing outcry from business interests, editorialized that the agency's move was "about killing coal as part of the Obama Administration's climate agenda" and an effort to "shut down industries on ideological grounds," heightening the political risk of vetoing Pebble.

"EPA is under attack for almost everything it's doing," says Pat Parenteau, a professor at Vermont Law School who worked for the agency during three 404(c) cases. "Any action that EPA takes has to be viewed in the larger political context of, 'How many of these battles can the agency fight?' "

The EPA has tried to defuse the pressure by denying that the watershed study portends a veto. But Phil North, who worked as an EPA ecologist on the study before retiring in April, says there is "a lot of sympathy" within the agency for the tribes' concerns. He believes the science of the watershed study is clear: Pebble Mine is incompatible with subsistence life based around Bristol Bay's abundant salmon.

"I've worked on every major mine in Alaska in one capacity or another," he says. "This was the first one that I ever saw, that as I worked on it, I thought, 'You know, maybe this one is not such a good idea.' "